Al Motasem Attiyah
Architect. Co-founder, Clear.
The light
A great deal of what is going up in Saudi Arabia right now could be going up anywhere. Al Motasem's work runs the other way. He co-founded Clear Group, which spans architecture, engineering, real estate development, investment, cultural experiences and the creative industries, and he is a Principal at Clear Holding.
His argument is that local identity is not a material palette. Patterns and references are the easy half, and the half that ages badly. The harder question is how people gather, celebrate, work and move through a place, and whether they come to feel any ownership of it, because that is what decides whether a building becomes an incubator for culture or a container for it. It takes years, and it has to be designed for from the start.
He was the architectural consultant and local identity expert for the Saudi pavilion at Expo 2023 Doha, which is the problem in miniature: how a building says where it is from without reaching for pastiche. He has spoken at the SHARE Architects international forums in 2026, and is a council member of the Saudi-Polish Business Council.
For a company taking premises here, or an owner deciding what a compound should feel like to walk into, that is the useful conversation. Not what the building costs, but what it says.