Largest University Designed for Women in Saudi Arabia Completed

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — Princess Nora Bint Abdulrahman University (PNU) in Riyadh opened in 2011 and completed its final phase earlier this year. The global firm of Perkins+Will, in collaboration with Dar Al-Handasah (Shair and Partners), designed the campus.
The 32 million-square-foot PNU is the largest university designed for women in the world, offering state-of-the-art educational facilities in all major academic disciplines to as many as 60,000 female undergraduate students. The 2,000-acre school replaced three existing campuses in Riyadh and helped more than double the number of college slots for women in the city. It also houses a K-12 school for children of those teaching at and attending the university.
The facility is designed using a cultural approach that creates a women-only environment for the majority of the campus, while only the medical center and limited areas of the research center are co-ed. Regional architecture and cultural tradition inspired the use of latticework partitions or mashrabiy’yah, which strategically screen female students for privacy in exterior spaces and allow for more visibility within the campus. As female students enter these areas of the university, these design techniques make it acceptable for them to remove their veils before female faculty.
Perkins+Will designed PNU’s Health Sciences and Research Campus, Academic Medical Campus, Academic Campus, K-12 schools, and Sports and Recreational facilities. Dar Al-Handasah, the architect and engineer of record, designed the master plan, administrative core and residential buildings, a campus-wide monorail and the overall infrastructure. The majority of the buildings on the PNU campus are registered with the USGBC’s LEED rating system, with certification goals of LEED Gold and LEED-certified. At the time the projects were registered, they doubled the number of LEED projects in Saudi Arabia.
“This project was of great significance personally and professionally,” said Pat Bosch, design director for Perkins+Will, in a statement. “This is the kind of transformative design project our firm aspires to deliver: to make a difference and help partner with a country’s leadership’s vision.”