An Integrated Architectural Design Framework for Climate-Resilient and Energy-Efficient Buildings in Saudi Arabia

Saudi buildings must deliver comfort, health and continuity under intense solar exposure, extreme heat, dust, water constraints, regional humidity and a changing climate while also supporting national energy-efficiency and sustainability objectives. Conventional practice often treats energy compliance, passive design, emergency operation, indoor environmental quality and commissioning as separate workstreams. This conceptual paper asks how these requirements can be organized as one traceable architectural performance case. It uses a purposive integrative review of official Saudi policy and building-code sources, international standards and peer-reviewed building-science literature. The synthesis produces the Integrated Climate-Resilient and Energy-Efficient Building framework (ICREB). ICREB combines six design domains: climate and occupancy briefing; site, form and passive load avoidance; envelope and material robustness; efficient systems and indoor environmental quality; resource continuity and renewable readiness; and commissioning, monitoring and adaptation. A five-step design hierarchy prioritizes avoiding loads before serving them mechanically and requires a defined minimum habitability mode for credible disruptions. Six lifecycle decision gates and a proposed indicator set make performance assumptions auditable from briefing through operation. The paper also shows how the framework should be tailored for interior hot-dry, coastal hot-humid and highland conditions rather than applied as a single national specification. ICREB contributes an architecture-led bridge between efficiency and resilience, but it is not an empirically validated standard. Its thresholds require project-specific modelling, authority review, pilot testing and post-occupancy calibration.