Ashab Al-Lal
Lead Architect for Ahmed Mater’s monumental land artwork in AlUla. We engineered a physics-based optical system within a sunken chamber to project a real-life mirage.
Ahmed Mater’s Ashab Al-Lal is a monumental land artwork conceived within AlUla’s desert Valley of Arts.
The installation guides visitors into a sunken circular chamber, where an engineered optical system reflects their image upward into the desert horizon.
This “mirage machine” generates a hovering apparition above the landscape, challenging perception and translating desert myths into lived experience, inspired by Ibn al-Haytham’s optical theories and natural mirages.
The artwork becomes vessel and phenomenon.
We supported Mater from initial sketches through RIBA 1 and 2, into the current RIBA 3 stage, aligning conceptual vision with technical rigor and ensuring each design decision respected landscape, myth, and science.
Mater describes the mirage as “the language of the desert,” a guide rather than illusion. The project embodies this belief, merging art and engineering into a transcendent desert experience.
Physic-based engineering
Engineering required modeling the physics of refraction to simulate the desert’s elusive mirage. Reduced-scale prototypes tested optics and structure, enabling refinement. This precision allowed the transition from concept to a credible, buildable system capable of producing profound perceptual effects.
From concept until scaled-version mockups
Our team collaborated across disciplines to integrate structure, optics, and environmental control, ensuring durability and clarity of experience. Each component was designed for resilience in AlUla’s extreme climate, advancing toward fabrication of the full-scale artwork with iterative mockups.
To validate the design concept, a reduced-scale mockup was constructed to replicate the mirage device’s essential geometry.
The prototype was composed of two parabolic revolving surfaces, calibrated to receive light through a top oculus.
Sixteen highly reflective slices formed the inner body, supported by a custom structural frame developed specifically for testing.
This configuration allowed the team to simulate the appearance of objects, assess optical phenomena, and verify physical behavior under controlled conditions.
The mockup demonstrated how precision and structural alignment, could transform light into perceptual illusion, confirming the feasibility of Mater’s artistic vision.
We designed scenography, visual sketches, and mockups to accompany exhibitions in AlUla, Bahrain and London. Rosa Verona marble maquettes acted as both study models and art pieces.
The exhibitions sustained momentum during the concept phase, offering the public insight into the hidden steps of creation. Displays combined drawings, models, and prototypes, revealing the complexity of development.
By staging the process as a narrative, visitors engaged directly with the artist’s research, deepening awareness and appreciation of a monumental work in progress.
A journey on transience and the invisible.
In a timeless desert, memories, myths, and visions converge: storms, voices, and stories of a phantom knight reveal the weight of past souls and future dreams.
From these visions, knowledge and imagination are born, empowering us to reframe reality and shape new futures.
