Case study
Founding Day Celebrations at Qasr Al Hokm
Three nights of public celebration in the historic heart of Riyadh, built around a heritage set that could not touch a single original surface.
- guests
- 120,000
- partners coordinated
- 11
- days on site
- 26
- Delivered
- 2026
The challenge
A public celebration for 120,000 visitors across three nights, on a heritage site with no fixings permitted, no vehicle access after 06:00 and an authority sign-off required at every stage. Eleven scopes had to share one 400 metre street with a single service entrance.
Scope delivered
- Freestanding Najdi heritage set across 400 metres of street
- Two performance stages with wind-rated roof systems
- AVL, projection mapping onto the historic facade and a full lighting design
- Crowd management, accreditation and an evacuation plan for 120,000 visitors
- Catering, hospitality and guest sanitation across three nights
How it was executed
Core split the brief into eleven work packages and wrote a single requirement spec per package, so that fourteen invited partners priced the same event rather than fourteen different interpretations of it. The freestanding structural requirement was written into the spec on day one, which is why no proposal arrived with a wall fixing in it.
The load-in was the real project. One service entrance, a 06:00 curfew and eleven suppliers meant the build sequence had to be published eight days before site access and enforced by a dock schedule with named slots. Nobody waited at the gate.
Every authority submission ran in parallel from week one: municipality licence, Civil Defense safety approval, GEA event permit and Ministry of Interior clearance for 260 security personnel. The Civil Defense pack was approved on first submission because the evacuation plan was drawn before the set was designed, not after.
We asked for one accountable partner instead of eleven contracts. That is exactly what we got, and the paperwork was ready before we asked for it.
Service categories on this project
Each one was written as its own work package, priced by competing partners against the same requirement spec.
- Client
- Ministry of Culture
- Venue
- Qasr Al Hokm District
- Format
- Riyadh
- Delivered
- 2026
The numbers
- Visitors
- 120,000
- Partners coordinated
- 11
- Build days
- 26
- Set built
- 400
- Safety incidents
- 0
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