As Safiyyah Museum & Park | X Architects

Medina has long hosted millions of pilgrims each year, centred on Al Masjid an Nabawi – the Prophet’s Mosque and Islam’s second holiest site. Under Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 agenda and early‑2020s tourist visa reforms that allow non‑Muslim visitors into parts of the city, the city must now present itself as a truly global destination with a clear local identity that is welcoming and legible to all.

In this rapidly intensifying context, the areas around the Prophet’s Mosque have undergone accelerated, tourism‑driven development. Designed by X Architects, As Safiyyah Museum & Park is a case study in how to build at this threshold without either competing monumentally with the sacred mosque or slipping into the language of generic retail architecture.

Designing for a sensitive threshold

Located on “the land of Alsafia”, a former palm garden just south of the Prophet’s Mosque and aligned with Bab Al Salam - one of the main historic gates used by pilgrims entering the mosque -  the As Safiyyah Museum & Park weaves museum, public park and commercial programme into an urban topography that mediates between the sacral perimeter of the Prophet’s Mosque and the everyday city around it. Rather than adding another standalone object to a skyline of hotels, As Safiyyah Museum & Park is conceived as a sequence of walls, gardens and rooms that channels and reframes the flows of pilgrims, residents and tourists.

The 20,000 sqm complex is organised as a choreographed journey from street to garden to museum. A thick perimeter wall buffers the intensity of traffic and infrastructure, reintroducing the sense of enclosure that historically defined Medina’s walled core and its palm gardens. Behind this wall, a stepped landscape of planters, courts and water basins reconstructs the micro‑topography of the former grove, offering shaded and contemplative spaces that act as a counterpoint to the surrounding congestion.

By crafting a slow transition through shadow, planting and stone before visitors reach the cultural and commercial programmes, the architecture deliberately resists the logic of immediate spectacle and consumption that dominates much contemporary religious tourism.

Basalt, volcano and critical materiality

Geologically, Medina sits within the western Arabian Shield and is surrounded by volcanic hills and basaltic lava fields. Materially, X Architects anchors the building within this context. Basaltic stone, drawn from the lava fields that surround the city, is the primary material of facades, floors and internal walls. The envelope is articulated as a thick, irregularly patterned skin whose protrusions and recesses deepen shadow, increase thermal mass and create a tactile, geologically resonant surface.

This choice of material is both environmental and critical. In a context where glazed high‑rise development has become the default architectural language, the dark basalt body asserts a different contemporary expression rooted in geology, climate and memory rather than in globalised glass and steel. Water - referencing an historic well on the site - and terraces planted with palms and native species are used as active design elements, reconstructing the idea of the oasis as a climatic and social device rather than as mere imagery.

The Story of Creation as spatial structure

At the core of the project lies the museum, conceptually organised around “The Story of Creation” in Islamic culture and spatially divided into five chapters: Pre‑creation, The Beginning of Creation, The History of Creation, The End of the Universe, and Absolute Justice & Ultimate Mercy.

The narrative is treated as an architectural framework that supports the curatorial content. Each chapter occupies a distinct spatial condition - shifts in height, light, acoustics and enclosure create a gradient from open, luminous spaces to more introspective, controlled environments. Movement through the sequence parallels a journey from undifferentiated potential to a more focused contemplation of justice and mercy, translating theological ideas into bodily experience.

In this way, X Architects translates a sacred story into plan and section, using architecture as an interpretive instrument, while maintaining a critical distance from literal scenography.

A civic ground for a global pilgrimage city

Programmatically, the project combines four main components: public garden, cultural museum, multipurpose hall and commercial spaces including souvenir shops and cafés.

As Safiyyah Museum & Park embraces the realities of Medina’s evolving role under Saudi Arabia’s tourism reforms while proposing a model in which landscape and narrative take precedence over pure commercial frontage. The project constructs a new civic ground where pilgrims, residents and visitors can encounter the city’s geology, history and cosmology in one continuous field, without encroaching on the sanctity of the mosque precinct.

Photography: Fernando Guerra