Oil, affectionately named “black gold,” has long played the overachiever of global resources – fuelling economies, geopolitics and just about every industrial ambition since the modern age started. It’s less a commodity and more a reminder that the world’s still very much running on something we dig out of the ground.
When Riyadh’s Black Gold Museum opened in early April, it could not have been at a timelier moment. As conflict in the Middle East escalated, oil, one of the region’s most critical resources, was in the political spotlight – and here was a new institution devoted to charting its complex history.
The museum is as thoughtfully done as you would hope. At its heart is the adaptive reuse of one of Saudi Arabia’s most significant contemporary landmarks; in fact, this is one of the most ambitious adaptive projects in the Kingdom to date, taking a building designed for a singular purpose and changing it into something completely different, as if to mirror the transformative story of oil itself.
