We took a long drive around north Riyadh on Saturday to see some of the buildings up there. Our first destination was the Burj Rafal Hotel Kempinski, which I had seen pictures of and which we found, but there was also a lot more interesting architecture up that way. Unfortunately, since I’m pretty much limited to shooting from the car right now because of my broken toe, many of the shots aren’t the best, It’s sort of comical, really – you can’t stop on most of the roads, so I have to get a distant view through the windshield, with often poor focus or color results (and the same boring perspective), or try to take the picture out my window, which is usually too close and results in cut off buildings or horrible distortion. In any case, I did get some, which is better than nothing at all to post!

This building was a complete surprise – I had seen pictures of it on the Kempinski site, through the windows in guest rooms, but it was so fantastical (and I had never read anything about it on Riyadh architectural sites), I thought it was some artist’s rendering of a building that didn’t yet exist. But it does, although I don’t know what it’s going to be.

The Al-Nakhlah building, posted earlier: