What the building is

The project is a 35,000 m² storage and distribution warehouse at Al Jouf, in the north-west region of Saudi Arabia, built for the National Unified Procurement Company — NUPCO — with V3 Middle East as consultant and Youssef Marroun Contracting Co. as contractor. It is completed.

The scope is a 20 m high warehouse for the storage and distribution of medical supplies and equipment, together with annexure buildings and the associated infrastructure works on site.

That is a large volume for a relatively narrow brief. Most of the difficulty is not in the building envelope; it is in what has to happen inside it.

Temperature control changes the architecture

The warehouse includes temperature-controlled storage areas covering a variety of temperature ranges. For medical supplies this is not a comfort issue — it is a product integrity issue, and it is the requirement that drives the internal organisation of the building.

Each controlled zone needs its own envelope, its own air handling, and its own monitoring, and each of those needs to be coordinated against the rack layout rather than added afterwards. The architectural consequences run through the plan: where the controlled rooms sit, how they are accessed from the distribution floor, how personnel and goods move between zones of different classifications, and where plant is located.

[VERIFY: what temperature ranges were actually specified, and how many separate controlled zones were there? These are exactly the details a reader searching for pharmaceutical warehouse design in Saudi Arabia will want, and only you can confirm them.]

Provision was also made for future expansion, so the building has to accommodate growth in NUPCO's requirements without the next phase requiring a structural or infrastructural reset. That is a design decision made in year one for a building that will be reconfigured over its life.

  • 20 m high storage and distribution warehouse, 35,000 m²
  • Multiple temperature-controlled storage zones
  • Annexure buildings and full on-site infrastructure
  • Future expansion capacity built into the design

Reading a 20 m high hall

At 20 m, the internal volume is large enough that the building behaves less like a room and more like a piece of infrastructure. The consequences show up in a few predictable places.

Racking dominates the floor plate. The racking layout, aisle widths, and turning radii for forklift traffic determine how much of the 35,000 m² is actually usable storage, and racking is a client and operational decision that has to be made before the architectural layout can be optimised rather than after.

The roof is a large uninterrupted plane, so drainage, and the detailing of every penetration through it, is a genuine design problem rather than a routine detail. Fire protection has to be coordinated against the racking and the sprinkler layout, which is visible on site in the marked fire protection lanes running across the floor.

The building also has to work at ground level as a logistics environment: numbered loading bays, dock levelers, and enough manoeuvring space for trucks to turn. The loading elevation is not a secondary facade; it is the operational face of the building.

The building in use

The completed facility shows the two halves of the programme clearly. Externally, a blue and white panel-clad elevation with a numbered loading run — bays 25 through 30 visible along the long face — and a high-bay automated storage hall inside, with tall pallet racking, marked floor zones, and sprinkler distribution running above the aisles.

Internally there is a full open-plan office floor alongside the warehouse, with workstations under a linear lighting grid and perimeter glazing looking out to the site. A marble-clad circulation area provides the more formal entrance sequence.

The night photographs are worth noting for a different reason: they show the canopy and dock lighting design working as a single continuous band along the elevation, which is what makes a building of this size read as one volume at night instead of a series of lit openings.

  • Panel-clad elevation with numbered loading bays 25 to 30
  • High-bay automated storage with tall pallet racking
  • Marked fire protection lanes across the distribution floor
  • Open-plan warehouse office with perimeter glazing
  • Marble-clad entrance circulation

What this project taught me about documentation

[VERIFY: this section should be your own account. What was genuinely difficult about documenting this building? Specific candidates: coordinating the controlled-zone envelopes against the racking, the roof penetrations, the expansion provision, the dock interface.]

The general point is worth making though. Buildings like this are drawn, reviewed, and built as a long sequence of interfaces, and the architectural documentation is the layer where all of them have to meet. A 20 m steel frame with multiple internal envelopes and a live expansion strategy is not a building where a drawing set can be produced once and closed.

Project facts

Published project data:

  • Client: National Unified Procurement Company (NUPCO)
  • Consultant: V3 Middle East
  • Contractor: Youssef Marroun Contracting Co.
  • Location: Al Jouf, Saudi Arabia
  • Area: 35,000 m²
  • Structure: 20 m high warehouse
  • Category: Storage and distribution warehouse
  • Status: Completed