Architect says country’s capital is ‘not the place at this point’ for new regional base
John McAslan + Partners has delayed plans to set up a new office in Riyadh due to a slowdown in work opportunities in Saudi Arabia.
The practice announced in August last year that it was launching a new office in the Saudi capital in response to “growing regional demand”.
But practice founder John McAslan told Building’s sister title Building Design the firm has now decided it is “not the time” to open the office and was considering opening an office in Dubai instead.
“I don’t think [Riyadh] is the place necessarily at this point,” McAslan said, adding that the practice might take a second look at the city “maybe in a few years”.
The decision comes following a widely reported downturn in development work in Saudi Arabia amid a sustained decline in the country’s oil revenue over the course of the past year.
Oil revenue fell to around USD $40bn in the third quarter of last year, down from USD $51bn a year earlier, with lower prices driving the kingdom’s deficit to 5.3% of its GDP in 2025, according to Bloomberg.
Several major projects on the huge Neom development have been scaled back including The Line, which had been intended as the centrepiece of its Vision 2030 plan to diversify the country’s economy away from a dependency on oil revenue.
Meanwhile, BIG is facing protests from staff after launching a mass-redundancy process for around 140 of its staff following the cancellation of a major scheme believed to be located on the Red Sea coast in Saudi Arabia.
McAslan said the “number one” reason for the firm’s decision to push back an office in Riyadh was the “cycle of projects in Saudi - projects are ending rather than starting”.
He said: “I think probably what’s happened is that there’s a huge number of projects running simultaneously and I think probably there’s a realism that they cannot do all of them and so [they are asking] which are the ones that are likely to be achievable by the World Cup [due to be hosted by Saudi Arabia in 2034]. I think there has been a realistic resetting of what can and can’t be done.”
He said the firm was currently in the process of setting up registration for an office in Dubai following its appointment on two large metro projects in the United Arab Emirates.
The Dubai office would be the firm’s fifth global base, adding to existing offices in London, Edinburgh, Sydney and New York.
Its announcement last year of plans for a Riyadh office came after a period of record growth which saw its turnover almost double to £21m and its profit jump almost fourfold to £4m.
The year’s performance followed the completion of a string of major projects including Sydney Central Station in Australia, Belfast Grand Central Station in Northern Ireland and the British Museum’s archeological research centre at the University of Reading.
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