- 2026 Pioneer Prize
- From Cultural architecture
Earth Protector: The Qiddiya Performing Arts Centre
Project Description
The Qiddiya Performing Arts Centre is the first flagship cultural asset of Qiddiya City in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, a city wholly dedicated to play and an epicenter of entertainment, sports, and culture. The project’s mission is to engender fresh interest in the performing arts among Saudi youth by providing pioneering new content for the 21st century, within a building designed as a massive, immersive stage.
The project presents a new model of ecological thinking. It lands on the ancient Tuwaiq cliffs, creating a vast shaded microclimate underneath, protecting people, animals, and plants from the sun and wind of the desert site. The building’s footprint is very small compared with its expansive structure above, creating vertiginous indoor/outdoor spaces and circulation flying far above the ground. Its radically open form, unlike the closed theater type of the 20th century, allows theater to spill out into the public realm.
The building’s megalithic slabs lean playfully on each other, like a scale model or a house of cards. They step down the cliffs, relating to the context in a surprising, raw way. Large black cuts connect the slabs together, creating moments of continuity across the discrete parts. Slabs and cuts together create an unfamiliar, alien silhouette against the sky.
The building’s form is mysterious and not immediately identifiable in terms of scale or origin. It might come from an ancient time or from the far future; its giant Chevron façade supercomponents appear out of sync with everyday forms of construction.
Qiddiya Performing Arts Centre exists as both a physical and a digital object, shifting in and out of relaxed daytime modes and dreamlike, glistening, technicolor modes. It is kind and happy, but also dark and full of wonder.
Tom Wiscombe, born in 1970, is Principal and Founder of Tom Wiscombe Architecture (TWA) in Los Angeles. His work is known for its powerful massing, alluring graphic qualities, and tectonic inventiveness, all underwritten by contemporary ecological thinking. He combines his renowned design expertise with a deep knowledge of construction and project delivery — gleaned from a thirty-year professional career — to create projects with the highest level of care and craft.
Tom’s work is radical in its treatment of architectural entities like ground, massing, interior, circulation, apertures, and ornament as independent objects within loose, curated collections, rather than as incomplete parts of a unified, singular whole. This approach stems from his influential theory of the flat ontology of architecture, which imagines architecture —and the world— as a set of discrete, lively entities that relate to each other in democratic rather than derivative ways. This allows his practice to move beyond received hierarchies of big to small, part to whole, and existing to new, and toward a deeply ecological understanding of buildings, cities, and landscapes.
Tom is a leading voice in contemporary design culture, speaking, writing, and organizing discourse around the ideas of today. His 2021 monograph, Objects Models Worlds, captures the breadth of his practice and ideas.
