National Commercial Bank, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia (Elevation)

Skidmore Owings & Merrill

Gordon Bunshaft

1978

An elevation drawing in felt-tipped pen and colored pencil on tracing paper that presents a monolithic, sunlit yellow façade pierced by a single recessed black window with a tiny row of palms, aiming to show how the bank’s austere exterior shelters a cool, inward oasis.

What hits you first is the vast, spare yellow plane—its tracing-paper texture and precise pen lines—relieved only by a deep, pitch-black square at midheight where minuscule green palms and tiny human figures dramatize the building’s monumental scale.

The sheet exemplifies SOM’s late-20th-century strategy of adapting international modernism to local conditions—using mass, shade, and inward-looking landscapes—to create climate-responsive, culturally resonant civic architecture that influenced subsequent regional design.

Palette

Art Terms

Architectural drawing Elevation drawing Architecture Colored pencil Drawing International Style

Exhibitions

Three New Skyscrapers

1983

Built in USA: Post-War Architecture

1953

Built in the U.S.A., 1932–44

1944

Transformations in Modern Architecture

1979