What’s Happening: Emirati firm Designlab Experience has transformed a palm farm into a pop-up of architectural (and social) potential. Surface contributor Jesse Dorris writes from Riyadh.

The Download: How does change happen? On a balmy Friday night, I stood in a crowded and slightly chaotic parking lot. Before me, an elegant tunnel beckoned. Its structure of metal beams arched into the air, somewhere between scaffolding and a tropical canopy. Once through, a world opened up that only weeks ago seemed inconceivable.

The architecture and creative firm Designlab Experience (DLE)—and the Saudi Arabia Ministry of Sport—had invited me to visit its latest feat of engineering and imagination. Operated in collaboration with local production company Blink Experience, Layali Diriyah is a 269,000-square-foot open-air installation of art and commerce, woven through a palm farm just outside the walls of the UNESCO-protected Al-Turaif district in Riyadh.

I wrestled with the invitation. I had my American understanding of the country’s abominable human rights records, particularly relevant to me as a queer person. I also had an impression of DLE co-founder Hibah Albakree, whom I met in New York City a few months ago, as an accomplished woman in an industry that, especially in Saudi Arabia, remains shamefully inhospitable to women and other minorities.

Last year, DLE designed scenography for a high-profile Emirati wedding: the bride walked down a reflective catwalk as if on water, within rows of Azuma Makoto sculptures featuring 28 botanicals confined in thick ice blocks. In 2019, Albakree, with DLE co-founder Mootassem El Baba and architect Marwan Maalouf, created an intervention of wire mesh and cork across the ruins of Riyadh’s At-Turaif Fort with Italy’s Studio Studio Studio; the result was somewhere between historical reenactment and Gordon Matta-Clark. If the point of design is to build out the possible, I wanted to see what might be possible today. So I accepted.

Layali Diriyah is open until Feb. 22 as part of the Diriyah Season annual celebration in and of the birthplace of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Elevated wood walkways snake through the site without interrupting the palm farm irrigation system; lights on delicate straps illuminated the path without damaging the trees. Light and shadows are central: 20,000 twinkling lights shine upon 3,000 laser-cut roses. In a farmhouse near the entrance, Dutch designers Vendel & deWolf installed Celestial Time Dust, a blazing swirl of orange LEDs. Studio Toer had two bright ideas: a series of lights that skitter across glistening artificial ponds like leaping fish, and motion-detecting light clouds that form playful iterations of wayfinding.

Deeper inside, treehouses designed by Bangkok’s Atelier 2+ Studio enclose clothing and perfume boutiques. Rope structures and latticework create semi-private spaces for dining, including Japanese, Lebanese, and Italian options, that compliment the boardwalk’s elegant carts for Saudi specialities. Visitors—there have been thousands each night—often spend hours here, wandering and drinking tea and bumping into friends.

“It’s become a scene for people watching and for new behaviors,” Albakree says. The restaurants are popular with women, who arrive in large groups. As the night progressed, women of many backgrounds ate, mingled, gossiped, and shopped. In Layali Diriyah, DLE (with the country’s aid) set a stage for a kind of global cosmopolitanism—part food hall, part art fair, part shopping mall, part flaneur ramble—to launch local businesses.

A harpist plucked her strings on a stage, vanishing after two minutes. “It’s like a ghost,” Albakree says. “You don’t know when she’ll reappear.” Perhaps she reflects DLE’s own quick-change artistry—it built Layali Diriyah in three weeks. A month from now, the lights will come down and the protected site will reappear unchanged, yet charged with potential.

The city is changing quickly, but not fast enough for many. Albakree believes the ephemerality of DLE’s architecture lets them create experiences people think aren’t possible. They may also complicate outsiders’ ideas of the city. “People are trapped in the cliches of their impressions of Saudi from five, six, seven years ago,” Albakree told me over lunch, sighing with exasperation. “They will not let those stories go.” Meanwhile, she’s already onto the next project: changing the location of DLE’s headquarters from Dubai to booming Riyadh.

In Their Own Words: “The world is changing so fast,” Albakree says. “People are learning to enjoy what we have. And I love that we are living our life to the max in our own country.”

Surface Says: From Layali Diriyah to the inaugural Islamic Biennale in Jeddah, the Andy Warhol Foundation’s lending of work for the AlUla Arts Festival to the massive The Line development in Neom, Saudi Arabia is becoming a major creative hotbed. Whether this will foster further equality for the country’s women, LGBTQ, and labor forces—or paper over the problems—remains an open question. It’s one we should ask in projects everywhere.

Have a news story our readers need to see? Submit it here.

Reach the design world every morning. Find out more about advertising in the Design Dispatch.

With its rolling hills and intoxicating vigneto, the sunbathed Tuscan hamlet of Borgo di Casanova would seduce even without its invocation of the famed lothario. Cannavacciuolo Group’s Laqua Vineyard resort is the area’s newest paramour, and it’s irresistible: six intimate suites designed by Torino’s Lamatilde take their names from amorous Greek figures including Cupid and Aphrodite, and their inspiration from a theater that once stood on the property.

A spa offers massage treatments with local grape-seed oil. And the scene-stealing main hall is clad in bricks of Etruscan black and velvet pink cotto, nodding to the brick-making traditions in the area. At one end, a counter sets the stage for tasting the region’s beloved wine, while the other offers the tasting menus that almost instantly earned chef Marco Suriano a Michelin star. One bite of the Pici in black kale sauce with almond and lemon—or a beguiling dessert of cauliflower, coffee, and pine nut—is more than enough to fall in love.

The fabled four elements of hip-hop are rapping, DJing, breakdancing, and graffiti; a fifth is often said to be fashion. A massive exhibition at New York’s Fotografiska might propose a sixth one: bearing. Not posing, exactly. “Hip-Hop: Conscious, Unconscious,” which gathers 200 photographs taken in the half-century since the sound stormed out of the South Bronx, isn’t here to call out the phonies. And its curators, Sacha Jenkins of Mass Appeal and photo director Sally Berman, aren’t necessarily arguing the subjects are muses.

What these extraordinary portraits do, when viewed as a whole, is prove how their subjects’ gargantuan talents also extend to connecting with the camera. In Geoffroy De Boismenu’s iconic 1994 photo of Christopher “Biggie” Wallace, his personality is so potent you can smell the blunt smoke; in a rare outtake, smoke obscures his face but can’t hide the notoriety. In the sunny Janette Beckman shot of Salt-n-Pepa goofing off in 1986, or a 1998 Christian Witkin close-up of Missy Elliott twirling bubblegum, or a waggish Angela Boatwright black-and-white of Nicki Minaj, you’re confronted with unparalleled charisma machines. Their poise is power.

It’s also a weight to carry. A 1972 Jean-Pierre Laffont photo of the young Bronx street gang Savage Skulls dealing with the cops is ruefully fresh. Chris Buck staged Chuck D. getting crucified on the White House fence in 1991—and there’s still tons to unpack in the image. We still haven’t caught up to the incendiary Nitin Vadukul imagining of Wu-Tang Clan either acting as or running from a militarized power structure on the hunt from 2000. But “Hip-Hop: Conscious, Unconscious” is a good entry point to think through what all this charisma had to contend with, challenge, and conquer.

New & Notable is a cultural catchall that highlights interesting new products and projects from our brilliantly creative members of The List. With new releases, events, and goings-on, these moments indicate their power to move the needle within and beyond realms like architecture, design, fashion, and art.

Last week, the Park Avenue Armory hosted more than 500 of New York’s most ardent design enthusiasts for the Winter Show’s Young Collectors Night benefit. Philanthropists, collectors, interior designers, and antiques enthusiasts communed over art, hors d’oeuvres, cocktails by Michters, and music by DJ Claire Marie to fête the night’s honorees, Emily Adams Bode Aujla and Aaron Singh Aujla. The night’s proceeds went to support the East Side House Settlement, a community-based organization serving the Bronx and northern Manhattan.

When was it? Jan. 26

Where was it? The Park Avenue Armory, New York

Who was there? Paul Arnhold, Wes Gordon, Ryan McGinley, Tyler Mitchell, Darren Jett, and more.

Japanese traditions have long influenced Theaster Gates, the civic-minded artist whose Rebuild Foundation has launched a variety of urban improvement projects in Chicago’s South Side. In 2019, he plumbed the intersection between the country’s philosophy and Black culture through sculptural assemblages at London’s White Cube. This past summer, at the Aichi Triennale, he transformed a former earthenware pipe factory in Japan’s once-booming ceramics hub of Tokoname into The Listening House, a space for creative exchange. It was a full-circle moment for Gates, who partook in a ceramics residency there in 2004.

His latest foray into this cultural binary lands at the Nasher Sculpture Center, where he transformed a gallery into Afro Mingei, a convivial gathering space that combines the culinary traditions of Japan and the African American South. On the menu are small plates such as cornmeal dumplings with shiitake leek broth and kabocha squash served on ceramic wares made by his design studio Dorchester Industries, which also fabricated the salvaged wood bar. Afterward, guests can revel with Japanese whiskey set to the tune of 1,000 vinyl records from Gates’s collection of soul and R&B music.

Moooi doesn’t tell designers what to do. It listens to what designers want to make, and tries to realize their dreams. It’s eclectic, and always on the edge of commercial reality and cultural interest. The brand creates conversation pieces, which make any environment feel special.

Surface Says: Marcel Wanders and Casper Vissers hit on something brilliant when they launched their Dutch brand in 2001. Tapping the world’s biggest design names for their range of eclectic offerings, the Moooi brand is indeed as attractive as its name (adapted from the Dutch word for “beautiful”) implies.

Aspiring actors can live in the cheap Rehearsal Club—if they audition.

TikTok’s emergent “corecore” movement bears some similarities to Dadaism.

Now there’s a way to adopt real-life dogs from their Decentraland avatars.

New York Public Library acquires the archive of Joan Didion and her husband.