AO Architects Turns Scaffolding and Tent Fabric into Riyadh's Bag Café

AO Architects built a 560-square-metre café in Riyadh out of red construction scaffolding and woven tent fabric — and left both in place as the finished architecture.

Completed in 2026, Bag Café (باق) stands in Al Muhammadiyah on a leased plot that carried a former restaurant, its drive-thru lane and a parking yard. Lead architects Ahmad Frehat and Ouda Alouda describe the project's founding contradiction: "BAG begins with a contradiction: a temporary construction system used to establish a permanent presence."

Nothing on the site deserved saving. "Nothing on the site was worth preserving in any heritage sense, and nothing on it was worth demolishing in any economic one," the architects state.

Why scaffolding?

The client arrived with two constraints: keep the existing structure and open in time for the winter season. Both ruled out demolition and demanded fast assembly. The answer was scaffolding as the primary intervention.

Rather than conceal the system once construction ended, the architects kept it as the work itself. A red scaffolding grid extends across the former parking yard, now filled with gravel, and continues inside to form part of the ceiling. The standard industrial finish already matched the brand's red, so the architects used the system without modification.

Woven tent fabric stretches across the structure, wrapped around the tubes, knotted at the scaffold's final edge and stitched around it. The pairing is deliberate. The architects note that the project joins "two construction systems associated with speed and impermanence in this climate: the scaffold and the tent." Both assemble and dismantle quickly. Neither is meant to be permanent.

What survives, what changed?

The design team rehabilitated the existing structure and rebuilt the kitchen and services. Key moves include:

• Corrugated galvanized sheet cladding, unpainted in its mill finish, running from exterior to interior
• A cast concrete floor with zero-size aggregate throughout the space
• Retention of the drive-thru lane, which remained in operation
• Conversion of the parking yard into the café's main outdoor space beneath the scaffold canopy

The entrance is marked by the black Arabic wordmark باق on a raw canvas panel. Visitors enter the courtyard from the street and rise toward the building along the site's natural change in level. That level change separates the café from traffic without introducing a wall. At the threshold, the path meets the main bar before opening to interior seating and the courtyard.

Inside, an oxide-red terrazzo counter and built-in timber benches sit beneath an exposed ceiling, with services and fittings fixed directly to the structural slab. Outside, lighting integrated into the scaffold tubing washes the fabric from below, keeping the red structure legible after dark.

How long can a seasonal building last?

The canopy is entirely dry-assembled, demountable and reusable — no component is cast in place. The architects designed the project for the lifespan of a single season. It has instead remained standing and become what the architects call "a recognizable reference within its surroundings."

For leased plots across Riyadh, where demolition is economically irrational and heritage value is absent, Bag Café offers a working model: rehabilitate the shell, colonize the yard, and let the construction system stay on as the building.