Museum of the Future

Seen from Sheikh Zayed Road, the Museum of the Future looks less like a building than a single polished object: a stainless-steel ring, some 77 metres tall, lying on its side on a planted green mound, with a great oval void through its middle. There are no straight walls and no vertical columns inside. The shell is made of 1,024 composite panels clad in steel, and each one is a unique three-dimensional piece, because together they carry an unbroken band of Arabic script that wraps the whole surface. At night the letters are lit from within, and the torus reads as a glowing calligraphic scroll hanging between the office towers.

The words are three sayings of Dubai's ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, about imagination, legacy and innovation, drawn by the Emirati calligrapher Mattar Bin Lahej. The windows are simply the gaps inside the letterforms, so the text is the glazing. The architecture is by Shaun Killa of Killa Design, with engineering by Buro Happold; the team wrote parametric tools and a growth algorithm to grow the steel structure that holds the curved skin, and robots fabricated the panels. It is one of those rare buildings where the calculation is as much the achievement as the silhouette.

The idea began as a travelling exhibition at the World Government Summit in 2016 and grew into a permanent institution run by the Dubai Future Foundation. The finished museum opened on 22 February 2022. Inside, seven floors are arranged as a story told from the top down: visitors start on a fictional orbital space station set in 2071, then descend through a laboratory devoted to repairing the living planet, a quiet floor called Al Waha ("the oasis") for the senses, a gallery of technology already in use today, and finally a play floor for young children. It is less a collection of objects than a staged journey, and the building itself remains the most convincing exhibit.

Getting there

The museum stands in Dubai's financial district, about 0.8 km from the neighbourhood of Al Satwa and in the middle of the city. Dubai International Airport (DXB) is about 9.6 km away. A 212-metre footbridge links the building directly to Emirates Towers station on the Dubai Metro, and a second bridge connects it to the Jumeirah Emirates Towers complex.