Hegra Viewpoints AlUla desert by Clover Studio
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British Architects and Designers, Clover Studio, have designed a series of viewpoints in the UNESCO World Heritage Site, Hegra in Saudi Arabia’s AlUla, through Extreme International and their destination development team. The project was commissioned by The Royal Commission for AlUla, to develop viewpoints for a safari-style wildlife and nature experience in the wildlife reserve portion of the archaeological site.
The temporary structures were designed to be lightweight and sensitive to the site and completely removable without any ground disturbance. Each viewpoint reinterprets the language of the Bedouin tents of the ancient Nabatean people of Hegra, whose wildlife art covers the ancient rocks. Instead of using the fabric and palm tree posts of the Bedouin tents, these viewpoints use stretched fabric over monolithic curved walls, to create a novel but sympathetic silhouette externally and provide shade to those inside viewing the unique landscape.
Extreme Destinations developed the concept alongside Royal Commission for AlUla for the guided experience and the necessary site infrastructure. Clover Studio designed the customer journey narrative and interventions in the landscape through storyboard sketches and a design process that combined architectural design, exhibition graphics and a spoken guided experience.
The three viewpoints have been designed as stops on a wider, driven wildlife and nature tour. By framing specific views of nature in key habitat locations they also act as a story-telling tool for the guides. Each viewpoint is paired with exhibition-style boards (also designed by Clover Studio) which complement a guided narrative through the reserve. Each curved wall has seating nestled within so that the visitors may congregate in the shade for a briefing by their guide on a specific vista. These graphic boards depict each part of the panorama with a description and narrative on the key themes of Nature and Conservation, Landscapes and Geology and Heritage and Storytelling.
As well as crescent-like walls, one viewpoint has a cylindrical tower from which the tent is supported. It contains a spiral staircase offering a 360-degree panoramic view from the top. Here Clover Studio’s design is playfully overcoming a paradox: a built viewpoint placed at a position in a landscape from where the natural views are most impressive, will itself block part of the view… The viewing tower experience also adds to the theatre of the tour through spatial compression and expansion: visitors travel through a narrow door into a darker space for refreshments and a briefing and then up the stairs to dazzling daylight and the epic unincumbered view of the vast surrounding landscape.
With the intensity of the desert sun, all natural material bleaches to a white bone-like colour over time. The natural canvas fabric and the walls are variations of this colour - like that of an animal carcass - standing out against a desert landscape of ochre reds and yellows. Clover Studio developed the language of the viewpoints through tensile fabric computer simulation. Various arrangements, sizes and curvatures of walls were placed under a rectilinear square of simulated fabric, like that of a square sided Bedouin tent, and generated fabric forms were tested. The 3D virtual tent surface of the preferred composition was used to produce a 2D cutting pattern for the final built form.
Each wall is made of a steel base plate and timber stud and filled with rocks from the locality to prevent the need for foundations and to minimize the weight of material transported into the reserve. These walls are then painted with render to seal and protect the wood from winter storms. The exhibition boards were designed alongside The Royal Commission’s graphic guidelines and are printed on bare aluminium to mimic the colour palette and rawness of the other materials.
Clover Studio was honoured to be chosen to design this project by Extreme International & The Royal Commission for AlUla and has very much enjoyed the whole process of working with their design partners. We are now looking forward to seeing the project enhance the tourist experience in a way sympathetic and respectful to this ancient landscape.
