Hotel Tower, KSA — A Contemporary Mashrabiya

This hotel project reinterprets the traditional Saudi mashrabiya through a contemporary architectural language. Rather than treating openings as simple perforations, the building mass is transformed into a series of layered envelopes that shape light, privacy, and spatial depth.

The façade unfolds as a vertical sequence of screens and voids, filtering daylight and views while creating moments of intimacy within the dense urban context. These layers dissolve the scale of the tower, breaking down its mass into a rhythmic composition of solids and transparencies.

Light becomes an architectural material—revealed, filtered, and contained—while the layered openings establish visual connections between interior spaces and the city. The result is a hotel that balances openness and discretion, transforming a monolithic volume into a culturally grounded, human-scaled landmark.