OMA Wraps an Entire Biennale in Fabric Inside SOM's Iconic Hajj Terminal in Jeddah

There are few buildings on earth that could host a 120,000 square meter cultural event and still feel like the architecture is doing most of the talking. SOM's Western Hajj Terminal at King Abdulaziz International Airport in Jeddah, a colossal cable-stayed structure of 210 semi-conical Teflon-coated fiberglass roof units suspended from 45-meter steel pylons, is one of them. When it opened in 1981 it was the world's largest fabric-roofed structure, built to shelter Hajj pilgrims in transit to Mecca, 43 miles to the east. For OMA, tasked with designing the scenography for the Islamic Arts Biennale titled "And All That Is In Between," the challenge was not to compete with this host but to inhabit it with something equally elemental: cloth, light, and carefully calibrated spatial compression.

What makes this project genuinely interesting is the decision to work almost exclusively with a single material family. Translucent white textiles of varying porosity and transparency form walls, columns, corridors, and pavilions across five galleries, two pavilions, and a vast outdoor zone. The material palette is deliberately restrictive; slight lighting variations provide the illusion of color diversity, giving each zone a distinct atmosphere without ever breaking the unity of the whole. It is OMA's first built work in Saudi Arabia, and it reads less like an exhibition fit-out and more like a parallel architecture inserted beneath an existing one.

A Terminal Reborn as a Cultural Landscape

The Hajj Terminal's conical canopies, each rising to 110 feet at a steel-ringed oculus, were originally designed to evoke the canvas tents erected for pilgrims in camps around Mecca and Medina. That lineage from nomadic dwelling to engineered shelter gives the biennale its conceptual grounding. Beneath the radial fabric canopies, OMA introduced low-angled walls, extensive plantings, and stone seating terraces to partition the desolate outdoor expanse into navigable zones. The result is something between a plaza and a garden, where visitors rest beneath palm trees and gather on pink carpet runners as planes taxi in the background.

The naturally ventilated western half of the terminal does real thermodynamic work here. The Teflon coating on the host building's fabric reflects 76 percent of solar radiation, maintaining roughly 27 degrees Celsius inside when exterior temperatures reach 54 degrees. Displacement ventilation assisted by air towers at ground level handles the rest. It is a reminder that the original building was itself a masterpiece of passive environmental strategy, and OMA's intervention wisely lets that system continue to function.

AlBidayah: Disorientation by Design

The opening gallery, AlBidayah (The Beginning), is organized as a sequence of irregularly shaped rooms and passages defined by curved translucent walls. The intention is explicitly disorienting: soft, hazy enclosures that slow visitors down and reinforce the stature of the objects within them. Ornate gilded doors sit on raised platforms against quilted white backdrops, and the compression of these intimate rooms against the terminal's vast overhead structure creates a productive tension between the monumental and the devotional.

The cream-toned fabric partitions glow from ambient lighting beyond, making walls feel less like barriers and more like membranes. You are always aware that something lies on the other side. It is a scenographic trick, but an effective one: it keeps the experience atmospheric without becoming theatrical.

AlMadar: An Archipelago of Light Columns

AlMadar (The Orbit) takes a fundamentally different approach. Where AlBidayah compresses, AlMadar opens up, organizing displays as an archipelago of singular and clustered light columns set within a more legible hall. Layers of textile are wrapped to form illuminated vertical elements that function simultaneously as wayfinding devices, display infrastructure, and spatial markers. A visitor in white stands before a wall of translucent panels, backlit display cases casting warm amber tones across the floor.

The lighting design, executed by Les éclaireurs, is critical here. Suspended copper lighting elements and track-mounted fixtures work against the exposed black ceiling infrastructure to create pools of focused illumination. The contrast between the warm glow of artifact cases and the dark overhead void gives depth to a space that could easily feel flat. Long horizontal display cases suspended below structural trusses reinforce the idea of objects floating in space rather than sitting on pedestals.

Projection, Performance, and Ceremonial Space

The biennale is not only about historical artifacts. Several zones are dedicated to immersive and contemporary formats. A curved projection screen displays archival imagery above a circular platform in a darkened room, while elsewhere a curved pink platform hosts interactive displays beneath projected video. These spaces feel more provisional than the textile galleries, deliberately so: they acknowledge that a biennale is a temporary event, not a permanent museum.

An interior auditorium, carved out with a curved balcony and rows of dark seating cubes, provides a more formal gathering space. The exposed black ceiling infrastructure overhead keeps the tone industrial and honest. It is a useful counterpoint to the softness elsewhere, anchoring the biennale in the reality of its host building's engineered bones.

The Outdoor Realm: AlMidhallah

The outdoor zone, AlMidhallah (The Canopy), expands on landscape interventions OMA made for the 2023 edition. Extensive plantings organize artwork locations, and planters soften an environment that is, at its core, an airport tarmac. Concrete volumes created by Giò Forma Architects house interior gallery buildings, with a water plaza at the center of the gallery complex providing a reflective focal point. Black steel-frame shelving in adjacent gallery halls provides a more conventional display framework for textile works and larger installations.

The evening views reveal the full force of the scenography. As daylight fades, the illuminated stone service counters and the glow of translucent pavilions against the dusk sky transform the terminal into something closer to a lantern than a building. The two pavilions, AlMukarramah and AlMunawwarah, occupy a square of nine canopy bays in the middle of the outdoor area, their fabric-wrapped enclosures glowing with precisely controlled interior light.

Plans and Drawings

The aerial view and plan drawings reveal the full scale of the operation: two parallel courtyard buildings separated by a roadway and pedestrian plaza, with gallery spaces, courtyards, and circulation paths organized in a muted but legible spatial hierarchy. The axonometric drawings are particularly revealing. One shows the campus layout with labeled buildings, courtyards, and pathways highlighted in red, making explicit how the biennale's many zones nest within the terminal's repetitive grid. Another presents cutaway views of four separate room volumes, illustrating how OMA varied ceiling heights, wall configurations, and display strategies within the constraint of a single material language. The wireframe drawing hints at the conceptual ambition: a futuristic urban landscape implied by the terminal's column grid, each bay a potential room.

Why This Project Matters

The Islamic Arts Biennale matters because it demonstrates that scenography, when taken seriously, can operate at an architectural scale without permanent construction. OMA treated 120,000 square meters of exhibition space not as a neutral container to be decorated but as a spatial problem to be solved with a deliberately limited toolkit. Translucent fabric, controlled lighting, and careful spatial sequencing produced five distinct gallery atmospheres within a single material system. That discipline is the project's real achievement.

It also marks a significant moment for the reuse of infrastructural buildings as cultural venues. SOM's Hajj Terminal, one of the most important engineering achievements of the late twentieth century, was designed for an annual surge of pilgrims and sits underutilized much of the year. The biennale proves that this building can absorb a second life without compromising its original identity. If anything, the event amplifies what was always there: the power of fabric stretched over vast space, the modulation of light through translucent membranes, and the ancient idea that temporary shelter can be as profound as permanent architecture.

Islamic Arts Biennale by OMA, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. 120,000 m². Completed 2023. Photography by Marco Cappelletti.

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