Through the Lens: Shoayb Khattab’s Architectural Exploration of KAFD
Shoayb Khattab has been honored as Exterior Architecture Photography of the Year winner in APMP 2025 for KAFD, a commissioned documentation of the King Abdullah Financial District (KAFD) in Riyadh. Featuring more than 90 buildings by renowned firms including Zaha Hadid Architects, Foster + Partners, and Henning Larsen, the project captures the district’s architectural scale and diversity across changing light, seasons, and perspectives. We spoke with Shoayb Khattab about the year-long process behind documenting KAFD, the challenges of photographing an entire district, and his approach to translating architectural intent into photography.
What was the brief for the award-winning KAFD project?
Shoayb Khattab: I was commissioned to produce a comprehensive visual archive of the completed KAFD district, capturing its architectural scale and design through high-end architectural photography and cinematic aerial drone videography. The brief covered documenting each structure with precision while highlighting the materials, forms and spatial relationships that define the district’s skyline, effectively building a complete visual library for one of the Middle East’s most ambitious urban developments.
Please describe your design process and how you approached the KAFD project.
Shoayb Khattab: KAFD isn’t one building, it’s a district of more than 90 towers by leading international architecture firms, so I approached it less like a single shoot and more like an ongoing documentation project. We returned across multiple separate sessions spanning almost a year, chasing different times of day, different seasons and different light. Some sessions were built entirely around a single sunrise or a single sunset, because certain facades only reveal themselves properly in specific light.
The work combined ground-level architectural photography with cinematic aerial drone coverage, and daytime with night photography, so every structure was documented from multiple angles and conditions rather than a single hero shot. For each building we produced thousands of images, ground to aerial, day to night, stills and video, of which what’s been published publicly is only a fraction of the full archive that now exists for the district.
What were the main challenges during the KAFD project, and how did you resolve them?
Shoayb Khattab: The biggest challenge was scale. Ninety-plus buildings by different architects, each with its own material language and its own ideal light, meant this couldn’t be treated as one single project. We resolved it by breaking the work into dedicated sessions built around specific conditions, sunrise only, sunset only, aerial only, rather than trying to force everything into a generic coverage pass. Coordinating ground photography with aerial drone work across multiple pilots and sessions over nearly a year also took real planning discipline, making sure the visual language stayed consistent across sessions shot months apart so the final archive reads as one coherent body of work rather than a patchwork.
What do you consider the most distinctive or innovative aspect of the project?
Shoayb Khattab: Most architectural photography documents a single building. KAFD required documenting an entire district as one coherent visual narrative, treating buildings by Zaha Hadid Architects, Foster + Partners, Henning Larsen, Gensler and SOM, among others, not as isolated subjects but as parts of a single skyline telling one story. The series was built around visual storytelling as much as architectural documentation, composing images that communicate not just what the district looks like, but what it represents as a benchmark for sustainable urban development and a statement of where Saudi Arabia’s architecture is heading.
Which outcomes of the KAFD project are you most proud of, and why?
Shoayb Khattab: What means the most to me is that this project put local Saudi architecture in front of a global audience, at a scale and quality it hadn’t been documented at before. Beyond the recognition, being named Architectural Photographer of the Year at the Architecture MasterPrize, I’m proud that a lasting, high-quality visual archive now exists for the entire district, one that architecture, design and real estate platforms can draw on for years, not just a single publication cycle.
What inspires your work, and who or what has had the strongest influence on your approach within your discipline?
Shoayb Khattab: My architecture training is the strongest influence on how I work. I read a building before I photograph it, trying to understand what the architect was actually trying to achieve, and I try to translate that intent into the image rather than imposing my own style over it. My editing process is little extensive, but the goal is always a fine-art, realistic image, something that looks like the building at its best possible moment, not a render, not a composite where the architecture stays the hero of the image.
What does receiving an Architecture MasterPrize mean to you, and how do you see it influencing your future work or practice?
Shoayb Khattab: It’s validation of an approach I’ve built my whole practice around, that photography grounded in genuinely understanding architecture produces stronger, more honest images than photography that treats buildings as generic backdrops. Winning for a project at the scale of KAFD, an entire district rather than a single building, tells me there’s real appetite for this kind of large-scale, long-term documentation work. Going forward I want to keep taking on projects at that scale, ones that let me tell the story of a place, not just a building, and continue putting architecture from this region in front of a global audience.
We thank Shoayb Khattab of Shoayb Khattab for sharing the story behind KAFD, the Exterior Architecture Photography of the Year winning project at the 2025 Architecture Photography MasterPrize. Through nearly a year of architectural photography and aerial documentation, the project creates a comprehensive visual archive of the King Abdullah Financial District, capturing its architecture, scale, and evolving identity in Riyadh.