Saudi Arabia ranks near the bottom of the world on women’s equality. In the country, women aren’t allowed to drive and are required to have male guardians , who sometimes grant access to basic needs like medical care. In 2011, women made up only 14.4% of all employees in the workforce.

And yet, despite all of this, women in Saudi Arabia can get a solid education. More women than men receive postsecondary degrees in the country, according to the Saudi Education Ministry (in 2009, 59,948 women and 55,842 men got postsecondary degrees). And a number of women are slowly entering the previously closed-off workforce, though there is still a sense that these graduates are incredibly well-prepared for careers that they may never get to pursue.





This is the backdrop against which architecture and design firm Perkins+Will, along with design consultancy Dar Al-Handasah, recently completed the largest women’s university in the world. Princess Nora Bint Abdulrahman University (PNU) is gigantic, especially considering that all of the buildings were constructed in just one year. Most campuses are built piecemeal over many years.

The 32-million square foot campus contains sports facilities (where students can attend female-only sporting events in addition to participating in athletic activities), a medical center, a health sciences and research center, and a K-12 school. While it was designed for an initial enrollment of 25,000, the university has the capacity to take up to 60,000 students–more than the total number of female postsecondary students in the country as of 2009.





Perkins+Will was tasked with unifying three existing campuses for women in Riyadh into one large campus (the old campuses are being repurposed). “The existing campuses were like any other campus–like in the U.S. or other parts of the world, developed in the ’60s or ’70s, but not meant to be designed for flexibility or growth,” explains Pat Bosch, design principal at Perkins+Will. “Twenty first century learning talks a lot about flexibility of space and team-based learning … the existing facilities were not meeting those needs. We wanted to consolidate these campuses to maximize flexibility and growth.”

Editor’s Note See videos of some of the Saudi women who joined a protest, defied the country’s ban on female drivers, and took their cars out for a spin–while listening to Bon Jovi and going to the drive-thru.

According to Bosch, the buildings on the campus are akin to the women who learn in them: incredibly sophisticated, and veiled on the exterior (in this case, to protect from searing heat and sun). “We’re taking from traditional architecture the strategies of multiple-layer facades, and we talk about buildings de-veiling as you progress more into the interior,” she says. The buildings are “layered on the exterior,” says Bosch, but as you progress into the main campus quad, the buildings become more transparent, with courtyards that open up to the classrooms.

“Buildings protect themselves from the view of the exterior so women are in an environment where they could de-veil themselves,” Bosch explains.