Challenge. A 125,000 m² urban site on the eastern coast of Saudi Arabia — a national Ministry of Housing competition asking for a complete neighborhood: hundreds of homes, mixed-use commercial, civic space, and a coherent identity. The brief asked for scale. The harder problem was character — how to build a Saudi neighborhood that does not feel imported, and that does not collapse into a repetitive grid of identical units stretched across an indifferent block.

Concept. Take the inner courtyard of the traditional Saudi house — the device that for centuries gave families privacy, climatic comfort through stack-effect cooling, and a center of social life — and scale it up. Make it the structural unit of a neighborhood. Each cluster of homes is built around its own shared inner courtyard. The same logic that governed one house now governs the community. The reference is the Al-Dawaser neighborhood in Dammam, 1935–1973: a city built courtyard by courtyard.

Key moves. A 12.6m structural grid lays the geometric backbone. The perimeter of the block is held by villas and duplexes that face the surrounding streets, providing eyes on the street and a domestic edge to the public realm. Inside, apartment clusters arrange in U-shapes around shared courtyards — semi-private hearts within a public field. A central east-west spine cuts the full length of the site, car-free for its central length, anchored by two civic squares — one circular green, one sunken — and lined with water features, cycling paths, and food-truck zones. Commercial uses concentrate on the western 60m street, keeping retail visible to the city while protecting the residential interior. Stack-effect courtyards, north-south airflow corridors, and shading devices form a passive climatic strategy embedded in the form. Three tiers of privacy, read from outside in: street → cluster courtyard → home. The neighborhood is one device, replicated.