Designing ILMI Science Museum in Riyadh

ILMI is going to be definitely the biggest museum that we have done so far.

Hello, I'm Andrea. I'm a design principal at WI.

I have been working at WI for over 20 years now, and today we are going to talk about ILMI, which is our new science museum project in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

At WI, our buildings all look different.

We don't have a style, but one thing that we want to achieve is evoke, uh, emotions and create a connection to a place.

One interesting thing about this building is that there is no front and back.

The whole building is actually supposed to attract people from different parts of the site.

The museum is made out of two parts. The bottom part is the large plinth-like space housing much of the gallery spaces and other public functions like auditorium, offices, museum shops, cafes, and restaurants.

And it's supposed to be this kind of gathering space.

Then on, you actually go into the rest of the building, whether you go down on the ground floor and wander through the canyon-like spaces, or you decide to go up through the globe and discover that world, uh, above us.

Once we enter the globe, it is actually supposed to be a space that is full of galleries and gardens.

As we go through the globe, people are going to be able to look out onto the site and actually end up on the very top, we will have the 360 view restaurant.

One of the features in this building is the indoor waterfall.

This is going to be the tallest indoor waterfall in the world.

It's coming from the very highest point of the building all the way down into the lobby, and it is going to be the first thing that everyone would see.

This is not an art museum. We're very well known for doing art museum exhibit designs, but this is going to be a science museum and primarily dedicated to children ages 6 to 16.

I hope ILMI becomes much more than a place people visit once.

I hope it becomes a part of growing up in Saudi Arabia, and I hope that by being in this space, that they feel inspired to ask questions.