Dubai: Dubai opened its Museum of the Future on Tuesday, a structure it touts as the world’s most beautiful building.
The museum is a seven-storey hollow silver ellipse decorated with Arabic calligraphy quotes from Dubai’s ruler. It takes pride in place on Sheikh Zayed Road, the city’s main highway.
The building’s striking facade was lit up by a colourful laser light show in the evening as crowds gathered outside to catch a glimpse.
It was officially opened later by Dubai’s ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al-Maktoum, whose vision of the future has been credited as the driving force behind the museum.
While the museum’s contents are yet to be revealed, it will exhibit design and technology innovations, taking the visitor on a “journey to the year 2071”, organisers said.
Roadside signboards described the museum — just minutes away from the world’s tallest construction, the Burj Khalifa — as the “most beautiful building on Earth” ahead of its gala opening.
It is the latest addition to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) collection of flashy architecture and comes after the $7-billion Expo world fair, featuring a swathe of futuristic designs, opened on Dubai’s outskirts on September 30.
Built for the Dubai Future Foundation, the seven-storey building contains a combination of exhibits dedicated to the future and workshops for testing and developing emerging technology.
Killa Design’s museum contains a 1,000-capacity multi-use hall, a 345-seat lecture theatre as well as numerous laboratory spaces.
Five floors of gallery space contain exhibits dedicated to space exploration, a digital recreation of the Amazon rainforest and prototypes of future products.
The 77-metre-high building is supported by a steel structure, developed with engineering studio Buro Happold, which was “digitally grown” using parametric tools.
This structure means that the building has no internal columns.
It is clad in stainless steel with windows in the form of quotes from the emirate’s ruler written in Arabic calligraphy.
Spanning an area of 30,000 square metres, the seven-storey pillar-less structure stands at 77 metres high.
The most striking part of the torus-shaped structure is the Arabic calligraphy inscribed all over the stainless-steel façade.
Over 14,000 metres of wisdom are carved onto the structure. Quotes from Sheikh Mohammed about the future and legacy form the words designed by Emirati artist Mattar bin Lahej.
Among the quotes are: “We may not live for hundreds of years, but the products of our creativity can leave a legacy long after we are gone.”
“The future belongs to those who can imagine it, design it, and execute it.”
“The future does not wait … The future can be designed and built today.
The UAE’s capital Abu Dhabi is home to another landmark design, a branch of France’s Louvre museum, whose licence was extended by a decade last year to 2047 at a cost of 165 million euros ($186 million).
After French President Emmanuel Macron opened the Louvre Abu Dhabi in late 2017, it attracted about two million visitors in its first two years before Covid hit.
The UAE is a major oil exporter but also a big player in the business, trade, transport and tourism, diversifying to reduce its reliance on crude.