02.

Landside: interview with Chip Richie

Chip Richie (CR) is a writer, producer and film director based in Dallas, Texas. In 1980, Chip and his father, Robert Yarnall Richie (1908-1984) made a round-the-world trip to film ‘Gateway to Mecca’, which documented the manufacturing and assembly of key components of the Hajj Terminal structure.

Yasmin Sabina Khan (YSK) is a structural engineer and author based in Chicago, Illinois. She is the daughter of Dr. Fazlur Rahman Khan: structural engineer, frequently described as ‘the father of the modern skyscraper’. Fazlur Khan’s contribution to the evolution of the award-winning Hajj Terminal was integral to its success. In 2004 Yasmin published ‘Engineering Architecture: the vision of Fazlur R. Khan’, a detailed account of her father’s work, written with both technical and personal insights. Yasmin has kindly and generously permitted me to reproduce extracts from her book.

Natalie Davidson (ND) is the curator and creative producer of Departures ‘81, an online exhibition and associated publication responding to my father’s archive of his time working on the construction of the Hajj Terminal and King Abdulaziz International Airport (KAIA).

(ND) How did the film ‘Gateway to Mecca’ come about?

(CR) My father had heard about the project and approached Owens Corning Fiberglass about doing a film on the project. He, and we, had worked in Saudi Arabia on a number of occasions. He did his first film there in ‘47 called ‘Desert Venture’. And you can see it on YouTube. It was sponsored by the Seven Sisters, the transnational companies such as Standard Oil, Texaco and Mobil. The film talked about the discovery of oil in Saudi Arabia and how America was going to help Saudi Arabia develop those oil fields and take it to market. Whilst there he met King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud [King Abdulaziz], who is the father of Saudi Arabia, that’s where the name comes from, the Saud Family. And then, a year later, he was commissioned by the King to come back and shoot his Royal portraits. So he spent 10 days in Khuzam Palace waiting for an audience with the King. He shot 5 x 7 colour Ektachrome negatives, we've got about eight portraits. One that was used most widely throughout the Kingdom, they used beyond the contract, let me just put it that way! They were very free willed with it.

He did his first film there in ‘47 called ‘Desert Venture’. And you can see it on YouTube. It was sponsored by the Seven Sisters, the transnational companies such as Standard Oil, Texaco and Mobil.

And then he went back to Saudi Arabia, I think in ‘52, to do a film that was presented at some sort of UN -  it might have been called the League of Nations back then. It was a presentation made and narrated in Arabic, basically just saying, ‘you know thank you very much, we appreciate being able to come here and exploit your oil’ [laughs]. So that was all a relationship with Aramco. And, over the years, he continued his relationship with Aramco based out of Houston. And in ‘76, we got contracted to go back to Saudi Arabia. We spent a month there on the base, in Aramco housing, and also living in Al-Khobar to make a film called ‘Challenge by Choice’, which I believe is up on the website. The colour is really terrible, but anyway, it was a film that would inform the wives of the new employees, of what their lives would be like in Saudi Arabia. So we found a family and we showed them boarding an airplane in America and going to Saudi Arabia and showing their base facilities, their home on campus, the swimming pool, the bowling alley. We went to downtown Al-Khobar for a shopping spree and we interviewed this family about what they thought about their experience. And in later years, you would see ads in newspapers, the headline would be ‘Challenge by Choice’ like we named it, and then it would say we have an opportunity for you to move to Saudi Arabia and work there. So that was in ‘76. So having had this connection with Saudi Arabia for so many years, when we heard about the project for Owens Corning, we were given the opportunity to bid on it and won.

(ND) Can you tell me about the process of making the film?

We made two trips. One was around the world. We were a crew of three, with my father [Robert Yarnall Richie] being the director, me being Director of Photography plus a Sound Man. We flew from Texas to Tokyo, then took the high-speed train to the city of Tsu where they built the pylons. We showed the manufacturing of the pylons there then we flew 20 hours to Jeddah, and spent 10 days photographing the very early development of the airport. They had one tent structure up and we were there to show them drilling the holes for the pylons to go in, the laying of the cement and then the assembly of the other structures, the fiberglass and the cabling that made them. After that we flew to Geneva because it was the closest big city to this town of Bourg-en-Bresse, France. where we showed the manufacturing of the cables, how they were spun, how they were folded by hand to make the end-caps that went in to be the foundation of the structure, that would hold up the tents. And then in the United States, we went to manufacturing facilities, I believe in New Hampshire, for Owens Corning and shot the manufacture of the fiberglass. So the film was all about assembling the project from start to finish.

We finished that film and delivered it, and then a year or two later, we went back when the first Hajis were arriving, getting off their planes, and the idea was that it would be a graduation into that community. So they're in an airplane and they get off and they're in this huge tent structure which is not air conditioned, but it's covered. And you had people coming from Africa and the Far East and Asia. And so we filmed people coming in, boarding buses to go to Mecca, which we didn't go to, of course. So that's the story of what we did in a nutshell. And it was roughly a two year project. It was an exciting project. Back then there was a film production magazine called ‘On Location’ and they had heard about the father-son team that was making this documentary on this very unique project. And so they contacted us and did a story on us, and we were featured on the cover where I was filming and my father was above me pointing, you know, the classic picture. So that's on the cover of that magazine and I have a copy of that.

Back then there was a film production magazine called ‘On Location’ and they had heard about the father-son team that was making this documentary on this very unique project. 

My father started out as a still photographer. He did covers for Fortune Magazine and Life Magazine and many Fortune 500 companies, he did the annual reports for. So when he got into filming in the late ‘40s, he was still a photographer. So whenever he would be on location filming something in 16mm, he would be taking pictures. So we have a lot of pictures that he took on location in Saudi Arabia.

(ND) Were you there when they raised the roof? Did you film that?

(CR) I believe that on the second trip they were just finishing that section. They'd opened up one section and it was revealed for Hajjis. I think the last section was still being finished and I shot a time-lapse of the roof being raised at sunset. Each pylon had a motor on it. And the motor was set for you know, so many inches per minute and it slowly raised it up and then once it was up, they anchored it.

(YSK) ‘The scale of the terminal roof structure can be appreciated by comparison with a multi-story building: the sixth-floor level of an average office building would locate the plane of the fabric structure’s lower edge at 66 feet above the ground; the width of each roof unit is more than two times this dimension. Raising the roof structure to its great height, the designers felt, was appropriate for the proportions of the terminal and necessary to achieve the ‘pleasant airy environment’ that they envisioned.’

(ND) It’s incredible and still gives me shivers seeing those shots. To think of building something of that scale in the desert from nothing. Do you remember what the atmosphere was like on that day when they were raising the roof?

(CR) Well they raised many roofs. I mean each peak was a raise. I do remember being told that they were spending six thousand dollars per square foot on the Royal Pavilion. If you could imagine that and that was six thousand dollars in 1980, which would be $25,000 a day, maybe per square foot.

I do remember being told that they were spending six thousand dollars per square foot on the Royal Pavilion. 

(ND) I remember my Dad talking about the Italian marble and the Royal Pavilion and I recently found a box of slides which must have been taken by an official photographer. You can see the structure of the Royal Pavilion going up.
Can you talk about the section of the film when the architects are all in a room, do you have any recollections of that meeting at all?

(CR) It was a very short period of time that we were able to get them together, of course they weren't there to make a film, but we were there to capture it and so we decided to make a reenactment because it had already been designed. So they talked about how the project was developed, they would look at one possibility, and they had some models in the room and they ‘this is the model we’ve decided upon’ and then [Dr. Fazlur] Khan was the one that said, ‘you know, we envisioned it because it was from the desert and we wanted to to have this historical aspect to it’. I think we were there for two hours at most to capture that.

(YSK) ‘With talents resting in both worlds, Khan intertwined an affinity for the poetic with that for the concrete- whether in the case of the East and the West or the aesthetic and the rational. His poetic sense of structural logic enabled him to affect the course of high-rise architecture in the twentieth century; it likewise gave him the means with which to meld historical precedent with sophisticated technology to create an efficient and economic structure in Saudi Arabia that honors the spirit of the pilgrimage at Mecca.’

(ND) And what did you personally make of the terminal structure? Did you walk in amongst it and around it?

(CR) I've got pictures of myself and my dad on top of it! We would go walking across it. We had, as filmmakers, and especially at that period of time and in a foreign country where OSHA [Occupational Safety Hazard Association] and all the attorneys since then weren’t involved, so we could pretty much go and do whatever we wanted to do, within reason. They would take us up in those huge man lifts to the edge of the fabric and then we'd have to unload our camera equipment onto the roof to walk on it and shoot on it. I put special shoes on the bottom of the tripod so that the spikes didn’t damage the tent. So, yeah, that's my recollection of it. It was huge. Standing under one of the modules looking up, everything was huge and I do remember them discussing having the tent raised really high so that there would be a breeze that could blow through there and that breeze would be shaded, so it would be cool. They were very aware of that. So it would be cool. I never did discuss with them how that would work in a sandstorm [laughs].