The Saudi architect and artist Aseel Alamoudi has won the Emerging Talent prize at the Institut du monde arabe's Prix du design 2026, for a pair of seats shaped by the rock of AlUla. The laureates were announced at a ceremony in Paris on 9 September 2026. Alamoudi, who is based in Jeddah, was honoured for Playformation: The Curve and The Dot, a project she made while in residence in AlUla.
Her public record is still short, which is typical of an emerging talent, and this profile keeps to what is documented. It is enough to show a designer who has taken a landscape known for its rock formations and turned it into something a person can sit on.
The prize in Paris
The Institut du monde arabe, known as the IMA, created its design prize in 2023, and 2026 was its fourth edition. The Grand Prix went to the Moroccan architect Salima Naji. Alamoudi's prize sits beside those of the Jordanian architect Sahel Alhiyari, who took the Jury Prize, and of Altin Studio for contemporary craftsmanship, Christopher Ghoussoub of Foukhar Studio for impact, and Areen Hassan, who won the Public Prize.
The jury was chaired by the Egyptian architect Shahira Fahmy. According to Le Matin, 26 projects reached the final stage, and the finalists were on show at the IMA until 20 September. Qatar News Agency carried the announcement on 11 September, listing every laureate.
Playformation: two seats, one landscape
The winning project is titled Playformation: The Curve and The Dot. Time Out Paris describes it as curved seating inspired by the rock formations of AlUla, where she was in residence. Qatar News Agency's English report gives the title as "Forming Through Play", a rendering of the same project.
Marie Claire Arabia describes the pieces as soft, ambiguous furniture that sits somewhere between a playground and a resting place. That is the magazine's own phrase rather than the designer's, but it captures the idea well. The two pieces take their names from simple shapes, a curve and a dot, and they translate the folds and hollows of sandstone into forms that invite a person to lean, perch or lie back.
An architect from Jeddah
Alamoudi is a graduate of SCI-Arc, the Southern California Institute of Architecture, according to Marie Claire Arabia, and she works in Jeddah. Asharq Al-Awsat and Al-Monitor both describe her as a Saudi architect and artist. Beyond that, a birth year, a degree year and a list of earlier works have not been published, and nothing here goes beyond what the sources say.
Time Out Paris gives her name as Aseel Othman Alamoudi, and other outlets write it Al Amoudi or Al-Amoudi. This profile uses the form found in most of the coverage of the prize.
The AlUla residency behind the work
Playformation grew out of the second edition of the AlUla Design Residency, titled "Designing Within". Alamoudi was one of five designers invited, alongside Altin from Tunisia, Paul Ledron, Ori Orisun Merhav and Studio Thus That. According to Al-Monitor, the programme was curated by Dominique Petit-Frere and co-directed by Arnaud Morand of AFALULA.
A residency of this kind gives a designer time in a place before asking for an object. For Alamoudi that place was AlUla, in north-west Saudi Arabia, a landscape of sandstone worn by wind into arches, folds and hollows. The residency exhibition was scheduled to open with the AlUla Arts Festival on 15 January 2026 at Madrasat Addeera, as announced in August 2025.
What the prize says about Saudi design
Saudi state media treated the award as a success for the residency programme as much as for the designer. Asharq Al-Awsat, citing the Saudi Press Agency on 28 September 2026, presented Alamoudi's prize and Altin Studio's craft prize as a showcase for the AlUla Artist Residency. Two of the six IMA prizes this year, in other words, went to work made in AlUla.
For a young designer the Paris prize is a form of introduction. It places her work in front of an audience at an Arab institution in Europe, and it ties her name to a project with a clear idea: that furniture can take its shape from the ground around it, and that a seat can be a small piece of landscape brought indoors.
What she makes next is not yet documented. The route so far, from Jeddah to a school in California and then to a residency in AlUla, is a map of how Saudi design is currently training and sending out its young architects. Her prize also arrives in a year when the IMA's list was notably regional: a Moroccan, a Jordanian, a Saudi, a Tunisian studio and a Lebanese studio, all recognised in one evening.
Playformation, in the end, is a modest idea carried out well. It asks a rock formation to give up its shape to a chair, and it asks the person sitting in it to feel how a landscape holds a body.
Sources: Marie Claire Arabia, Qatar News Agency, Time Out Paris, Asharq Al-Awsat, Le Matin, Al-Monitor