Stone-Ideas.com 
The Italian company Grassi Pietre, based in Nanto (Vicenza) at the foot of the Alps, supplied its Giallo Dorato natural stone for the wall cladding and flooring of Villa AM in the Saudi Arabian city of Jeddah. The architects were from the Barcelona-based firm Mesura. The client’s wish was to build in harmony with the local environment while respecting Saudi Arabian architectural traditions.
The Italian limestone perfectly complements the color palette of traditional buildings in this country on the Arabian Peninsula. Jeddah is one of the oldest cities in the region, boasts a striking old town that is a Unesco World Heritage Site, and, situated on the Red Sea, offers the most important access to the pilgrimage city of Mecca. Today, it has over 3.5 million inhabitants.
For centuries, building there has meant creating shade and harnessing the wind, when it was present. While Jeddah has a harsh climate with long, hot, humid summers and short, dry winters, it also benefits from a constant breeze that blows strongly and steadily from the water at a height of about ten meters.
The challenge was to capture this breeze, and the Spanish architects achieved this with their recessed second floor. Here, a portion of the airflow is captured and channeled into the interior of the house.
Windows facing all directions ensure that a genuine breeze flows through the building.
This also allows sunlight to enter the building. The light acts as a kind of thermometer: in the hours after sunrise, it has a cool hue; at midday, it is brilliantly bright; and at sunset, it bathes the sky in peach tones.
Numerous corners and narrow passageways within the house create variable zones of shadow.
In their description, the architects expressly thank the clients for allowing them to immerse themselves in the traditional architecture the client enabled us to do this over five years of collaboration “investigate without judgment and to make mistakes, helping us to understand and work on his willingness to create something different and unique that fit a set of contemporary values that we, as humans and architects, support as well.”
Photos: Marina Denisova, Guillem Cruells, Mesura
