Diriyah Company has awarded a SR1.84bn ($490m) construction contract for the Saudi Arabia Museum of Contemporary Art to a joint venture of AlBawani and Hassan Allam Construction Saudi. The building will have a gross floor area of 45,252 square metres and a total built-up area of 77,428 square metres.
Diriyah Company has awarded a SR1.84bn ($490m) construction contract for the Saudi Arabia Museum of Contemporary Art to a joint venture of AlBawani and Hassan Allam Construction Saudi, signed at a ceremony in Riyadh.
The museum, known as SAMoCA, will have a gross floor area of 45,252 square metres and a total built-up area of 77,428 square metres, according to the developer. It is an initiative of the Museums Commission, intended to collect, research and display modern and contemporary art from Saudi Arabia, and it will sit inside the wider Diriyah masterplan on the northwestern edge of the capital.
The award takes Diriyah past $29bn of construction contracts let on a development the Public Investment Fund values at $63.2bn — one of the highest conversion rates from masterplan to signed construction of any Saudi giga-project. PIF projects that on completion the development will contribute about SR70bn ($18.6bn) directly to Saudi GDP, create more than 180,000 jobs, house around 100,000 people and draw 50 million visits a year.
The contracting side of the award is as informative as the building. AlBawani is one of the larger Saudi contractors and already holds Diriyah work, including a share of the Wadi Safar hotels package. Hassan Allam Construction Saudi is the local arm of the Egyptian group, and its presence on a landmark cultural building is a marker of how far the Saudi market has opened to regional contractors with the balance sheet to take on complex, low-repetition structures.
Museums and performance venues are unusually difficult buildings to price. They have little repeatable structure, heavy services loads for climate and conservation control, bespoke facades and acoustic requirements that drive the design of everything behind them. Clients typically procure them with a large design contingency and a contractor experienced enough to absorb late changes. That Diriyah has been able to let one at a fixed value, in a year when several Saudi sponsors have sent designs back for cost revision, says something about how far its own design work had progressed before it went to market.
SAMoCA joins a run of cultural and hospitality awards that has defined Diriyah's procurement. The developer awarded an SR5.1bn ($1.4bn) contract for the Royal Diriyah Opera House to a joint venture of El Seif Engineering Contracting, Midmac Contracting and China State Construction Engineering Corporation. It let an SR8bn ($2.13bn) package to Urbacon Saudi and AlBawani for four hotels — Aman, Six Senses, The Chedi and Faena — together with the Royal Diriyah Equestrian & Polo Club at Wadi Safar. It has awarded about $600m to Salini Saudi Arabia for 400 retail units at Diriyah Square, and roughly SR717m ($192m) for the One Hotel in the Diriyah II area. A tender is out for a Montage hotel and 30 branded residences at Wadi Safar.
The logic of that sequence is commercial rather than ceremonial. Cultural anchors and luxury hotels are what give a heritage district a reason for visitors to travel to it, and they are comparatively small tickets against the residential and commercial build-out that follows. Letting them first establishes the destination while the wider funding environment tightens, and it puts revenue-generating assets on the ground before the bulk of the capital is committed.
Third-party developers are building alongside. Dar Global has awarded an SR338m ($90m) infrastructure contract to Compass and Bin Omairah Company for its Rayana community at Wadi Safar, one of several private schemes taking plots inside the Diriyah masterplan.
Diriyah is being built on the site of the original seat of the Saudi state, and the design code across the development is drawn from Najdi mud-brick architecture. For contractors that means an unusual amount of the value sits in facade and finishes rather than frame — labour-intensive work, difficult to industrialise, and the reason packages here tend to be let to joint ventures pairing a Saudi firm with an international partner rather than to a single contractor.