Museum of the Future Opens in Dubai

The asymmetrical torus-shaped building is striking for its form but also its skin: 1,024 stainless steel panels featuring calligraphic cutouts spelling out forward-thinking quotes in Arabic by His Highness Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum. The facade was a canvas for artist Mattar bin Lahej, while the building itself was designed by Dubai's Killa Design with engineering by Buro Happold. The building is a readymade icon in a city that has no shortage of them.

Located adjacent to the Emirates Towers and cozying up to the elevated Metro line (it is connected to both via bridges), the MOTF is built upon a green plateau, a garden covered in around a hundred species of plants and trees, including ghaf, palm, and acacia trees. The plateau serves as a three-story podium that houses an auditorium, retail, parking and services, while the 77-meter-tall building contains six exhibition floors and one administrative floor. The building and "green hill," in the architect's words, comprise two of the projects three main parts; the third is "the void" that represents the future — "what we do not yet know."

According to a press release from MOTF, the 30,000-square-meter "architectural marvel" "invites people to experience the technologies and trends that will shape the future of humanity," while also serving as "a 'living' laboratory designed to foster a spirit of collaborative innovation among the Arab world’s leading scientists to inspire new out-of-the-box solutions to tomorrow's greatest challenges and spur a new era of scientific discovery in the region and beyond."

How the optimistic yet ambiguous goals of the museum — the brainchild of the Dubai Future Foundation — will be addressed in exhibitions is hard to determine from the photographs made available by the museum, which show empty spaces that accentuate the effects of the calligraphic skin on the building interior. Some ideas can be gleaned from the short animation, at bottom, made by Killa Design for the competition, which illustrates how the floors inserted into the torus could be filled.