What the building is

The Red Sea Central Transportation Hub and QC Lab is a 9,053 m² building developed for The Red Sea Real Estate Co. in the West Region of Saudi Arabia, with Khatib & Alami as consultant. It completed under Youssef Marroun Contracting Co.

The structure is a 12 m high steel frame. That height is the single most consequential number on the project, because it governs the door heights on the maintenance bays, the depth of the structural bays, the drainage strategy across a very large roof plane, and the reach of the mechanical distribution serving the building.

The QC Lab sits alongside the hub within the same facility, so the quality control function and the transport operation share a building rather than sitting as separate structures on a site.

Separating light from heavy vehicles

The functional core of the building is a maintenance area and repair workshops for two very different vehicle populations: light goods vehicles and heavy goods vehicle buses.

These are separated based on functional and operational requirements, not simply by nominal bay size. A bus bay needs greater height, greater door width, a different floor loading, a different ventilation regime, and a different vehicle manoeuvre pattern than a light goods bay. Sharing a single undifferentiated hall would have meant over-provisioning the whole space for the worst case.

The planning consequence is that the two workshop types each get a clear, dedicated zone, and the structure can be rationalised around the actual demand of each.

  • Light goods maintenance and repair, zoned separately
  • Heavy goods vehicle bus repair workshops
  • 12 m high steel structure serving both workshop types
  • Quality control laboratory within the same facility

The welfare brief is the architectural brief

What separates this building from a purely industrial shed is the driver support and welfare provision built into it: washrooms, changing rooms, a shared canteen, lockers, and a prayer room serving all staff and drivers.

This is not a secondary fit-out. Drivers on a transport operation spend long blocks of time on site between routes, and the quality of those hours affects retention, punctuality, and safety. [VERIFY: whether welfare provision was part of the original client brief or was developed during design — this changes how you describe the design story]

It also has a direct architectural effect. A canteen, changing rooms and a prayer room have completely different environmental and spatial requirements from a vehicle workshop: they need daylight, acoustic control, durable finishes, and a circulation route that does not pass through a live vehicle bay.

Separating those two worlds cleanly — heavy and dirty vehicles in one zone, people in another — is the central spatial problem of the building.

What the completed interiors show

The finished building reads as a coherent public-facing facility rather than an industrial shed. The approach plaza is sheltered by tensile canopies, with curved concrete seating and a gravel ground treatment that softens the arrival sequence.

Inside, the shared canteen is defined by a dark timber counter and a suspended linear timber slat ceiling, lit warmly against a pale plaster surround. The timber slat rafters are doing acoustic work as much as visual work, breaking up a hard ceiling plane over a space that would otherwise be very reverberant.

A meeting and coordination space is organised around exposed white cross-braced structural columns, which bring daylight deep into the plan and give the room a clear structural identity without partitioning. The reception area pairs a vertical timber slat partition against a deep teal wall, with a timber counter and a red fire door deliberately left visible as part of the composition.

  • Tensile shade canopies over the terminal approach
  • Curved concrete seating and gravel plaza landscape
  • Timber slat ceiling rafters over the shared canteen
  • Exposed cross-braced columns organising the meeting space
  • Vertical timber slats against a teal feature wall at reception

What this kind of building asks of an architectural engineer

Logistics and transport buildings are usually presented as structural problems. They are also, continuously, a documentation and coordination problem, because the number of interfaces between structure, services, doors, drainage, and vehicle movement is high and the tolerances are tight.

[VERIFY: describe your actual scope here — what proportion of your work was architectural shop drawings, BIM coordination with MEP, Saudi Building Code review, and site coordination? Be specific about which of those four you actually did on this project.]

The 12 m height that makes the building work for buses is also what makes the coordination hard. Services have to cross a large uninterrupted volume, the roof plane is big enough that drainage detailing becomes a design issue rather than a default, and any architectural opening has to be checked against a structural zone grid that is already committed.

Project facts

Published project data, useful if you need the specification rather than the story:

  • Client: The Red Sea Real Estate Co.
  • Consultant: Khatib & Alami
  • Contractor: Youssef Marroun Contracting Co.
  • Location: Red Sea, West Region, Saudi Arabia
  • Area: 9,053 m²
  • Structure: 12 m high steel building
  • Category: Transportation hub building
  • Status: Completed