Controlled Openness: How Architectural Agency Remade Public Space and Civic Life in Riyadh’s Oil-Boom Era (1980s–1990s)

This study investigates how architectural buildings integrating open-space architectural forms that enabled new modes of public space contributed to reshaping civic life in Riyadh between the 1980s and early 1990s. While previous scholarship has largely focused on the city’s infrastructural expansion and planning discourse, it has given limited attention to the role of architecture in producing spatial openness and publicness in culturally conservative, climatically harsh, and state-directed urban contexts. Using a multi-case qualitative methodology, the research examines three landmark projects—Kindy Plaza in the Diplomatic Quarter, Qasr Al-Hukm District, and the Ministry of Municipal and Rural Affairs & Housing—and analyzes their formal configurations, user behaviors, and socio-spatial implications. The findings reveal that these projects introduced varying degrees of “controlled permeability” and hybrid public typologies, enabling shifts in spatial behavior, civic identity, and urban connectivity. Framed within a contextual model synthesizing theories of socially produced space, architectural mediation, relational urbanism, and typological adaptation, the study offers new insights into how architecture can mediate public transformation in non-Western cities undergoing negotiated modernity. The research contributes to broader discourses on urban design, architectural agency, and public life in the Global South.