Façade engineering

In Madinah a fully glazed envelope is a cooling bill unless something shades it. The pointed-arch screen on the hospitality building is not ornament: it carries the solar load across 29 000 m² of façade so the glazing behind it can stay open to daylight instead of being reduced to slots.

The same logic drives the panjara screen on the administrative building. The traditional pattern is read at building scale and given structural work to do, which is the difference between using a motif and quoting one.

Detailing decides whether any of that survives procurement. An envelope that depends on a single supplier, or on a tolerance nobody on site can hold, is a detail that will be substituted — so the system is chosen for what can be built in that market.