Thirty-four projects. No stage rounded up.

The Ayah Project

A museum for Madinah about the oldest question anyone asks. Ayah means a sign, and it also means a verse — the concept is built on that double meaning: the Qur'an tells the reader to look at the heavens, the earth and themselves, and this is a building that asks a visitor to do exactly that. Six rooms carry the journey, from the beginning of the universe to the human being to what we do next with what we know. There are no areas yet and no programme schedule; what exists is the route, the argument and the form.

Typology

Museum

Chapters

6

Stage

Concept

Concept by

THE FİKİR

Airport waiting zone

A waiting hall for the airport, drawn as an arcade rather than a shed. One bay repeats along the whole length — a pointed white arch, glazed between the piers — and the roof above it is a single dark band, perforated, that reads as one line from the approach road and as shade from underneath. The building is one storey and almost all elevation, so the elevation is where the work went. Inside, the arches become a lattice canopy over a glazed colonnade, with the seating set against the glass and planting run the length of the hall.

The set tests the roof twice: once as a solid white shell that carries the arch line straight through, and once as a dark diagrid that lets the sky into the hall. A third variant drops the arches altogether for a flat timber canopy on slender columns. Nothing in the drawings says which was chosen.

Use

Waiting hall

Storeys

1

Bay

Pointed arch, repeated

Roof options

3tested

Exhibition centre

An exhibition hall whose structure is the whole building. A row of raking white fins stands clear of the glass and carries a canopy that cantilevers well past them; the wall behind is glazed from ground to roof and braced with diagonal ties, so the fins take the load and the wall takes only the weather. The result is a long, low front with deep shade at the entrances and no solid elevation anywhere along it — which is the point for a hall whose contents change every month.

Use

Exhibition

Structure

Raking fins

Envelope

Full-height glazing

Stage

Concept

Nodira Begim residential complex

A residential block that puts its commerce on the street and its living above it. The ground floor is a run of arched shopfronts in white stone; above them the elevation is ordered by full-height pilasters with the windows set deep between them, and the flank steps back into open balconies where the block turns the corner. The top storey is set back behind a cornice, so the mass reads as finished rather than cut off.

Use

Residential over retail

Street level

Arched shopfronts

Elevation

White stone, pilaster order

Multi-use hospitality building

Four hundred and twenty-four keys in seven room types, on a plot of 4 370 m² asked to carry 32 555 m² of building. That arithmetic is the whole problem: fifty-nine per cent of the site goes under the building, sixteen floors climb and two go down, and the elevations end up holding 29 000 m² of glass. The pointed-arch screen is not ornament — it is what shades that glass.

Keys

424

Room types

7

Height

71.0m

Above ground

16floors

Below ground

2floors

Plot

4 370m²

Built area

32 555m²

Site coverage

59%

Shaded glazing

29 000m²

Qamchiq Mountain Resort

ARTIFEX's own 1.749 million m² mountain development is organised by the terrain rather than imposed on it. The arrival sequence combines a commercial promenade, a four-floor parking building and a 320-metre traditional market; higher zones hold hotels, chalets, villas, entertainment and two cable-car stations. The complete study coordinates 59 chalets, 45 villas, a 16 000 m² entertainment zone and the hospitality programme as one destination.

Administrative building

The long elevations take the sun, so the long elevations carry the screen. An arched, perforated panjara stands in front of the glass and carries the solar load rather than passing it inward — the shading is architecture here, not equipment. The plan pairs a circular assembly hall with linear office wings, and a formal forecourt with terraced planting carries the approach; twenty views of the scheme sit in the strip on the left.

HBR multifunctional complex

Offices, retail and residence on a single plot, with a planted roof terrace over them. Each use wants its own entrance, its own service route and its own hour of the day; the concept is the arrangement that lets all three share one address.

Al-Khorezmi Presidential School

An eight-hectare campus, presented at head-of-state level and approved at concept. The badge is worth reading slowly: the concept has been approved, which is a different thing from a building standing, and we will not write it as though it were the same.

Campus

8hectares

Presented

Head-of-state level

Westminster International School

The campus is planned on the tulip form, and the form survived: what stands is close to the concept that was drawn. On a campus of this size that is the fact worth reporting, because it is the one most often quietly lost between drawing and handover.

French House

Sixteen apartments with the interiors finished, not only the shell, handed over twelve months from the start. Interior finishing is where residential schedules usually go; this one stayed inside its own.

Apartments

16

Interiors

Full finishing

Delivery

12months

Koshkar-Ata Riverwalk

The river runs 1 795 m through the district, and the plan takes that length as the organising element rather than as an edge to be tidied. Fourteen water installations stand along it, one for each region of Kazakhstan, with a 65 m fountain at the centre — a sequence that has to be paced across 1 795 m and still read as one figure from either end. The scheme is drawn as lots: the riverwalk, a park of 171 205 m² beside it, and four residential parcels around them, each sheet showing one lot complete with the rest of the district held in grey behind it.

Tashkent City — centre concept

Eighty hectares of new centre. ARTIFEX contributed to the concept, and the entry is listed at that weight and no heavier — on a project this size the difference between contributing and authoring is the whole truth of it.

Area

80hectares

Role

Concept contribution

Luxury Waterfront Street

Retail and public space along a neglected watercourse — the kind of line a city has usually already written off. The concept treats the water as the reason for the street rather than something the street happens to pass.

Leisure Park

Ten hectares of retail and entertainment, planned as one ground rather than a row of separate attractions: the landscape is the circulation, retail frames the open ground, and the entertainment anchors sit inside the park instead of beside it.

Area

10hectares

Programme

Retail + entertainment + park

Figures

Pending publication

Covered Beach

An indoor beach of 4 000 m² with eight metres of clear height, entered for Expo 2017. The clear height is the brief: below it the room is a swimming hall, and above it the space starts to behave like weather.

Beach

4 000m²

Clear height

8m

Entered

Expo 2017

BM Tower

A business centre planned around floorplate efficiency — how much of each floor a tenant can actually use, settled in the plan long before it is settled on the elevation.

Canyon Mall

A commercial centre shaped as a canyon — the form is the plan, not a name given to it afterwards. The retail street runs as a ravine between the two built walls, daylit from above, and the anchors sit at the ends the way a canyon holds its pools.

Innovation & Technology Hub

A working ecosystem, not an office block with a label on it. The test is whether anything would change if the sign came down; the plan is drawn so that it would.

Innovation Centre

A spiral of stacked floors wound around a domed hall, with the drum of the hall lit from a circular roof light and the ramp of the spiral carried out into the landscape as a path. The site drawings show water on two sides and the approach taken across it rather than around it. The folder these came from is named for the building and nothing else about the commission has been written down here yet.

Type

Innovation centre

Status

Not yet published

Townhouse Terrace

Facade studies for a terrace of townhouses, drawn as a run of variants rather than as one answer: the same plot width and the same three storeys carried through a modern white treatment, a brick and timber one, and a classical elevation with a mansard. What is being tested is how far a single terrace can vary before it stops reading as one street. Dated 2017 and 2018.

Type

Townhouses — facade studies

Status

Not yet published

Al Nakheel Hotel

A slender hotel tower in Madinah whose whole facade is a single screen: interlocking pointed-arch precast elements, drawn from the palm the name Al Nakheel carries, laid over a glazed envelope. The same arch returns inside as the guest-room window — a tall opening that frames the Haram skyline from a twin room finished in warm timber and cream. A mezzanine restaurant in dark timber, hung with brass chandeliers, completes the sequence.

Hotel Mirage

A hotel tower for Al Madinah built on one wrapping move: a rounded volume carried the full height inside a perforated white screen drawn from the mashrabiya. At dusk the skin works in reverse — lit from within, the tower reads as a lantern over the palm-lined street below. In daylight the same perforation registers as woven white fabric, a single continuous surface with no front and no back.

Al Qanat Residential Complex

A residential quarter for Madinah, laid out as stepped beige blocks with planted roof terraces and palms in the spaces between. From the air the quarter reads as one continuous landform; at street level it resolves into individual blocks with deep balconies over a ground-floor colonnade, so the shading is done by the building itself rather than applied to it. The night view of the masterplan sets the whole quarter against the mountains behind the city.

2 800 m² Residential Complex

A 2 840 m² plot in Al Madinah carrying two residential buildings that read as one: pale stone volumes set side by side, dark recessed balconies cut into the facade, and a set-back top level that makes the crown read as shadow rather than an added floor. Basement, ground and four typical floors — 8 740 m² built, of which 6 370 m² is sellable — over a basement car park of 50 bays. A car court fronts the buildings, planted with pink-flowering trees; from the street corners, one view caught at dusk, the pairing is plain: one composition holding the corner from both directions.

The apartments run from one-bedroom units of about 76 m² to three-bedroom units of 155 m², with a majlis and an open dining room in the larger plans; each entrance serves a short run of flats, so no corridor is long. The concept came with its materials — limestone cladding on a ventilated system, dark metal window frames, warm stone at the entrances — and with a concept-stage cost study, approximate and stated as such, so the client could start from a drawn number rather than a promise.

Quran Tower

A landmark tower for Al Madinah, named for the Quran and organised around a single move: two white shells part along the full height of the shaft, revealing a spine of gold geometric pattern that narrows as it falls and resolves into a pointed arch at the base — the entrance. The tower tapers as it rises over a palm boulevard; at dusk the patterned spine holds the light, and by evening the arch reads as a lit threshold into the building.

Al Hijrah Commercial Centre

A 1 136 m² commercial plot on Al Hijrah Road studied through a complete location, ground-floor, typical-floor and parking sequence. Eight shops activate the ground floor; three office floors place four offices on each level, twelve in total; and a dedicated level provides ten parking spaces. Six architectural directions test pointed fins, curved and rectilinear glass, folded elevations, roof terraces and warm terracotta arches without changing the core commercial programme.

Masjid Al-Qiblatayn Precinct

A precinct drawn around Masjid Al-Qiblatayn, one of Madinah's most historic mosques. The extension frames the existing building rather than competing with it: white arcades run in repeated bays, rows of domed roof lights bring daylight into the covered halls, and shaded courts hold the ground between arcade and mosque. Seen from the air the new fabric reads as a low white plinth; the minarets remain the tallest elements on the site.

Grand Palace Hotel

Two mid-rise hotel blocks stand facing each other across a street in Madinah, and both are finished the same way at the top: rooftop pools and planted terraces, so the guest amenity sits above the city rather than behind it. The main block carries the hotel's name on its crown — the building announces itself where it meets the sky, not at the pavement. Seen from the air, the pair reads as one composition holding the street between them.

Business Centre

An office tower on a rounded-triangle plan, its defining move read most clearly from the air: a full-height planted court cut into the roof, dropping a garden down through the centre of the volume. The facade is a gold lattice laid over glass and carried around the curved corners without a break, so from above the tower reads as one continuous skin with a green void at its heart, set directly into the Tashkent street grid.

Residential and Commercial Complex

A residential and commercial complex in Tashkent, seen from the air: white mid-rise housing blocks under pitched roofs, set in a green landscaped site that gathers around a swimming lagoon. A curved commercial spine runs along the edge of the plot, keeping commerce on the perimeter and leaving the interior to gardens and water. The housing reads as repeated blocks rather than a single mass, the pitched roofs giving the ensemble a domestic scale even from above.

Al Hijrah Walkway

A three-kilometre civic and commercial promenade for Madinah, connecting daily movement with retail, landscape and public life. The 35 000 m² proposal distributes shops, cafés, playgrounds, green areas, a mosque and public facilities along the route, while a 5.4-kilometre cycling and jogging loop forms a continuous active-mobility circuit.

Abdulxadi Apartment

A private residential study organised around a central open court and a warm, deeply modelled stone facade. The coordinated plan set covers basement, ground and first floors plus two second-floor alternatives, allowing the living, guest, service and roof programmes to be compared before the final arrangement is selected.

Restaurant in Almaty

A restaurant building in Almaty, designed and built in 2014. The photographs follow it from the steel roof frame and brick shell on site to the finished stone facade with its tall arched windows.