Governmental · 1982 · Riyadh · Unknown

Telecom Towers (originally Ministry of Post, Telegraph & Telephone Towers)

The Telecom Towers, originally built as the Ministry of Post, Telegraph and Telephone headquarters, and now owned by Saudi Telecom Company (STC Group), stand on King Saud Road in Riyadh's Sulaimaniyah district. Built by Saif Numan Saeed & Partners (SNS), a firm specializing in precast hollow-core concrete slabs and prestressed structural systems, the towers were completed in 1982, opening alongside Riyadh's first street tunnel in the surrounding area, in the late years of King Khalid's. According to the 1980 Arup Journal, the German structural engineering firm Wolff & Müller, together with the contractor SAUDICO, commissioned Ove Arup & Partners to carry out a geotechnical survey and site investigation, on the basis of which the building's foundations were redesigned. Vertical concrete sun breakers run in straight lines across the upper facade, giving the towers their defining slenderness, while a three-story arcade at the base uses triangular arches drawn from Najdi architecture, most visibly in the hexagonal main entrance block, carried on slender columns. The office floors are organized into four hexagonal blocks, two regular and two irregular, with a ground-floor lobby leading to the vertical circulation core and beneficiary spaces of varying size; the building's south side opens into a larger shared office space. The towers originally housed the kingdom's national telephone exchange, worked through the 1980s and 90s by Canadian engineers from Bell Canada, remembered locally as "Abraj al-Sahra," Desert Towers. Naif Al-Eissa, a Saudi employee who worked in the building until 1997, recalled that the towers had no 13th floor, the elevators ran directly from the 12th to the 14th, a superstition-driven omission he attributed to the building's British and Canadian technical staff.