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For thousands of years mud houses have represented the practical wisdom and spirituality of people, particularly those of desert regions, who learned how to use local materials to build homes that fitted the environmental and cultural conditions, in which they lived. As a case study, the central region of Saudi Arabia exhibits a tradition of earth architecture that is unique in style, culture and sustainability. Aiming to contribute towards the local debate of the suitability of the traditional mud architecture for today's lifestyle of Saudis, this paper explores the sustainable nature of the traditional adobe architecture of this hot arid region from environmental, social and technical points of view.

ABSTRACT:Saudi Arabia has a rich architectural heritage that can be found in all regions of the vast country. Except for a small number of publications the recording and documentation of the traditional built environment was not content of detailed scientific investigations so far. But with the increasing decay of the architectural heritage the interest for this kind of research is rising. A mirror of this efforts is the National Built Heritage Forum, annual conference, launched in 2010 by his excellency Prince Sultan bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud and the Saudi Commission for Tourism and Antiquities (SCTA). In that frame Saudi universities are intensifying research and educational programs for the research of traditional architecture. In 2008 the Department of Architecture of the College of Environmental Design at the King Abdulaziz University established a cooperation with the Department of History of Architecture and Building Archaeology of the Vienna University of Technology with the aim to start an exchange of knowledge and experience in building archaeology and building survey. An important part of this cooperation was a workshop for staff and students in the historic centre of Jeddah. The aim was to train methods and techniques on typical examples in the old town of Jeddah, Al Balad. This paper is describing the layout of the workshop, the process of the work and examples of the results.

Jugol is an ancient African Islamic city. Due to its distinguished architectural and urban character that constitutes a unique blend of Islamic culture and African traditions, it was recently enlisted in the world heritage list. Currently, the city is suffering from a number of problems including poverty, congestion, isolation, weak accessibility, and environmental degradation. The current study is an attempt to mitigate the isolation and lack of accessibility problems utilizing space syntax as an analytical technique and design support tool. Isolation and lack of accessibility were found related to the changes in city's structure, recent expansion of the city outside the fence towards west, resulting in a shift of the city's integration core towards the west, thus weakening city's accessibility. A number of alternatives were tested and the alternative that improves the city's accessibility and alleviates its isolation was identified.

Transition in the urban configuration of Arab cities has never been as radical and visible as it has been since the turn of the last century. The emergence of new cities near historical settlements of Arabia has spawned a series of developments in and around the old city precincts. New developments are based on advanced technology and conform to globally prevalent standards of city planning, superseding the vernacular arrangements based on traditional norms that guided so-called "city planning". Evidence to this fact are the extant Arab buildings present at the urban core of modern cities, which inform us about intricate spatial organization. Organization subscribed to multiple norms such as, satisfying gender segregation and socialization, economic sustainability, and ensuring security and environmental coherence etc., within settlement compounds. Several participating factors achieved harmony in such an inclusive city-an organization that was challenged and apparently replaced by the new planning order in the face of growing needs of globalized, economy-centric and high-tech models of development. Communities found it difficult to acclimatize with the new western planning models that were implemented at a very large scale throughout the Kingdom, which later experienced spatial restructuring to suit users' needs. A closer look the ancient city of Yanbu, now flanked with such new developments, allows us to differentiate and track the beginnings of this unprecedented transition in settlement formations. This paper aims to elaborate the Arabian context offered to both the "traditional" and "modern" planning approaches, in order to understand challenges and solutions offered by both at different times. In the process it will also establish the inconsistencies and conflicts that arose with the shift in planning paradigm, from traditional-"cultural norms", to modern-"physical planning", in the Arabian context. Thus, by distinguishing the two divergent planning philosophies, their impact of the Arabian morphology, relevance to lifestyle and suitability to the biophysical environment, it concludes with a perspective on sustainability particularly for in case of Yanbu.