King Abdullah Financial District
Commissioned to document the King Abdullah Financial District in Riyadh. It became the most extensive project in this practice: over a year of photography across three sessions, covering the district rather than a building in it.
KAFD holds more than ninety buildings by some of the most recognised names in the field, and is the largest LEED Platinum certified mixed-use business district in the world. A district that size cannot be answered in one visit, in one season, or at one time of day.
The series was built around visual storytelling as much as documentation. A district of this ambition is not really described by a catalogue of elevations; it is described by what it is trying to be, and that meant composing for what KAFD represents as a benchmark for sustainable urban development.
For each of the ninety buildings, thousands of frames were produced: ground level to aerial, daylight to night, stills and film. What is published here is a fraction of an archive that now covers the entire district.
The named work includes the PIF Tower by HOK with Omrania, the SNB Head Office by Foster + Partners, the Conference and Exhibition Centre by SOM, the Metro Station by Zaha Hadid Architects, the Mosque by Omrania and the Financial Plaza by Henning Larsen.
Returning across seasons mattered more than it usually does. The faceted and perforated facades that give the district its character behave completely differently in high summer sun than they do at low winter angles, and a single visit would have shown only one of those buildings.
What made the project matter beyond its scale was the chance to put Saudi architecture in front of an international audience on its own terms, rather than as a curiosity.
The work took First Place in Cityscapes at the International Photography Awards 2025. It was a finalist for Best Architecture Photography Project of the Year at the Créateurs Design Awards, presented at the Shangri-La in Paris, and went on to win the same category at the Grand Prix du Design in Montréal. It was also awarded Best Architecture Exterior Photography Project of the Year at the Architecture MasterPrize, and has been published in several books.
The practical lesson of KAFD is that scheduling is the work. Ninety buildings, drone clearance, building access, prayer times, traffic, and the two short windows a day when a glass tower is not simply a mirror, all have to resolve into the same shoot day.
That is why it ran across three sessions instead of one long one. Anything that could not be answered properly in the first was carried into the next rather than compromised.
