Falcon, Vision in Flight (2025) | Nir Sivan Architects

In Saudi Arabian culture the falcon stands for strength and nobility. It is a royal animal, yet it carries something deeply human: attitude, desire, craving. Watching it, Nir Sivan did not try to copy its outline. His hand went to the space between things, filling the gap between bodies with warm volumes and a composition that seems to beat like a pulse.

The work began as a single form, conceived for Vision in Flight, Sivan’s proposal for the Tharwa Sea Front in Al-Khobar, submitted to the 7th Mujassam Watan Urban Sculpture Challenge (2025). That proposal imagined a mirrored landmark on the Arabian Gulf. These sculptures return to where the project started: the hand.

Redrawing the lines of the first volume in a quick sketch, Sivan saw the single mass split into three elements. The new composition is abstract. It follows the speed of the sketch, the velocity and acceleration of a line drawn without hesitation. The three volumes stay separate but close, and the narrow gaps between them become the real subject. Each body pulls toward the others and completes them. At times the three read as a family. At other times they read as the essence of the falcon itself.

The process moves between craft and computation without letting one replace the other. The hand sketch and the white clay models came first, shaped entirely by hand, and they still carry the marks of the fingers. The clay was then 3D scanned and reverse-engineered into a mathematical surface using subdivision algorithms in Rhino. Generative AI also played a decisive role. Rather than polishing the original single volume, it transformed it completely and pointed toward a composed, multi-part form. Sivan then read that suggestion back through his own three elements. The machine opened a path, and the artist’s hand decided where it led. The 3D-printed version closes the loop: its fine layer lines are the digital equivalent of the fingerprint on the clay.

This is the method at the core of Sivan’s practice, borrowed from automotive design: sculpt first by hand, then reverse-engineer. The result is neither a portrait of a bird nor a pure geometric exercise. It is an attempt to model flight itself, the moment before movement becomes visible.

The project: Vision in Flight, Al-Khobar, Saudi Arabia.