On oil's founding ground
The King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture, known as Ithra, stands in Dhahran next to the Prosperity Well, the Kingdom's first commercial oil well. Saudi Aramco launched the project at its 75th anniversary. King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz laid the foundation stone in 2008, and the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Salman bin Abdulaziz, inaugurated it in 2016 after more than eight years of construction.
The Norwegian firm Snøhetta designed it in flowing, curved lines with no sharp angles, a deliberate break from traditional Saudi architecture. The forms draw on rock formations as an image of unity, and in 2019 the building won the American Concrete Institute's Excellence Award.
Inside
The complex covers 80,000 m². It holds a four-storey library, a cinema, a performing arts theatre, the Great Hall, a Children's Museum and an archive. The 18-floor Ithra Tower houses the Idea Lab, the Energy Exhibit and a museum of five galleries.
The library alone keeps more than 326,000 printed books in Arabic and English and some 34,000 audiobooks. Ithra receives about a million visitors a year, and in 2018 it was ranked among the world's 100 greatest places. The well beside it is told in Dammam No. 7.