Al-Kindi Plaza

Riyadh's Diplomatic Quarter was laid out in the early 1980s as a self-contained district of embassies and official housing, and Al-Kindi Plaza is the piece that had to make it a place rather than a compound. Ali Al-Shuaibi and Abdul-Rahman Al-Hussaini of the Riyadh practice Beeah strung twenty-six thousand square metres of limestone-faced building along the secondary streets, then cut it with shaded alleys and courtyards that funnel into a maidan facing the district mosque. Almost nothing is tall; the shade comes from mass and narrowness rather than from mechanical cooling. The Aga Khan Award jury gave it the 1989 prize for holding the traditional relationship between the mosque and the other public services, and for landscaping that works with desert plants as a self-sustaining system.