Hilton Riyadh Hotel & Residences

Designed in collaboration with Omrania, the Hilton Riyadh is located along the city’s Eastern Ring Road, a major thoroughfare that links King Khalid International Airport with downtown. Two towers—a 20-story, 645-key hotel and a 14-story, 221-unit serviced apartment building—are connected by a large podium at grade. The podium provides a variety of food and beverage outlets, 6,500 square meters of meeting facilities, and a large, 4,100-square-meter multipurpose hall, the largest in the city. Leisure and recreational facilities include a men’s spa, health club and pool, as well as similar private facilities for women. The roof of the multipurpose hall features a mixture of garden areas and terraces that connect the building to the surrounding landscape, as well as relate to the area’s overall master plan.

The project’s two towers anchor the site on the east and west, with each planned and configured as three pinwheeling legs around a central elevator core. The towers are sited to optimize views and solar shading, as well as allow for the large multipurpose hall to span the area between the structures. This connection creates a relationship and orientation in the tower masses to unify the complex.

The hotel tower has multiple two-level atriums that rotate around the elevator core, creating internal light wells and providing movement in the overall massing. At the end of the guestroom corridors, windows offer daylight and additional views of the surrounding site, which aid in orientation. The hotel facade is expressed with undulating reveals along the glass faces, with solid, tapered end walls to frame the mass.

The apartment tower has linear slots along the intersecting three wings running the height of the tower to bring light into the core. Here, the glass façade has a weave of undulating forms that, again, bring movement to the mass and are framed by solid, tapering end walls.