Diriyah, the 300-year-old birthplace of the first Saudi state and a cradle of traditional Najdi mud-brick architecture, is being transformed into a 14 sq km cultural district of museums, civic buildings, residential neighbourhoods and public spaces. Within this setting, the Grand Mosque designed by Dubai-born X Architects – widely regarded as pioneers of contemporary Gulf architecture – will serve as one of Diriyah Gate II’s principal civic anchors, marking a key point of arrival into Saudi Arabia’s flagship heritage and cultural district.

Located at the meeting point of Diriyah Gate’s grand boulevard and the historic Wadi Hanifah, the Grand Mosque is conceived as a contemporary Najdi landmark that reconnects daily civic life with ritual worship. Occupying a 21,690 sqm plot and offering 12,300 sqm of built area, the mosque will accommodate up to 11,400 worshippers and serve local residents and visitors arriving at this gateway to the wider development.

A connector between city and wadi

The site’s defining feature is Wadi Hanifah, a historic valley which cuts across the plot. X Architects’ design merges a major place of worship with the natural landscape, treating the mosque as an intermediate terrain that bridges the urban side of the boulevard and the wadi’s ecological corridor.

A sequence of plazas, shaded passages and landscaped terraces leads worshippers and visitors from the street level down towards the wadi edge, choreographing encounters between the flows of everyday life and moments of contemplation. A grand, stepped entrance hall carved from the building volume gathers people beneath a deep triangular portal, turning arrival into a shared journey of moving from light into shade and back towards the landscape.

The central mosque plaza is designed to host Eid prayers, community gatherings and weekend markets, extending use beyond prescribed prayer times and reinstating the mosque as a social and civic anchor. Around it, colonnaded walkways and planted courts create a porous edge where residents can pass through, pause or stay without crossing a hard threshold between “mosque” and “city”.