Interiors

Foster + Partners’ national museum of the UAE opened to the public in December 2025 in the Saadiyat Cultural District. Visitors enter Al Liwan, a light-filled atrium enclosed by honed white concrete walls poured in situ, their layered finish made white with local crushed marble; the practice describes interiors that mirror the warm-white sand of Saadiyat Island.

Four pod-shaped galleries clad in glass-reinforced concrete hang above the atrium, so daylight from the five steel wings slips around them. The towers’ triple-laminated glazing carries a dense mesh interlayer, each pod has an electrochromic rooflight, and gallery entrances are wrapped in patinated bronze.

Adjaye Associates’ interfaith centre opened in March 2023: a mosque, a church and a synagogue, each a 30-metre cube, around a raised garden. All three share Omani limestone, oak and an off-white concrete made with aggregate from Saadiyat, with bronze detailing and textured plaster.

Inside, each answers its faith in light. In the mosque, two layers of mashrabiya scatter circles of sun across the floor beneath nine rising vaults. The church gathers oak pews under a pyramid of timber battens, and in the synagogue a bronze mesh falls like a tent from a skylight over the congregation.

The Cultural Foundation stands beside Qasr Al Hosn. The Architects’ Collaborative — the firm founded by Walter Gropius — won the 1973 international competition for its design, and the young Iraqi architect Hisham Al Ashkouri led the project; it opened in 1981 as the first institution in the region devoted to arts and literature.

Fair-faced concrete is its defining material, worked with geometric patterns, tiled arches, wooden interior detailing, arcades and a mosaic-tiled fountain. A renovation led by CEBRA, with Elgaard Architecture as restoration consultant, kept that character and reopened the building in 2018, with a 900-seat theatre and the Abu Dhabi Children’s Library.

Warehouse421 is an arts and culture space made from two former industrial warehouses in the old port of Mina Zayed. It opened in November 2015, designed by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) and commissioned by the Salama bint Hamdan Al Nahyan Foundation.

BIG kept the upgrade deliberately minimal. Concrete floors and white-painted steel give the galleries a neutral backdrop, and five planted courtyards bring daylight between them through fully glazed façades. Outside, perforated Cor-ten plates in Arabian geometric patterns shade the patios and windows and echo the rusting industrial sheds of the port around them.

Emirates Palace opened in November 2005, designed by Wimberley Allison Tong & Goo, and became a Mandarin Oriental in January 2020. Its architecture draws on Arabian and Andalusian design: high arches, decorative motifs and grand hallways beneath 114 domes.

The largest, over the Grand Atrium, is 42 metres across, covered in silver- and gold-coloured mosaic tiles and topped with a gold finial. Marble from Italy, Spain, China and India was chosen in 13 colours to reflect the desert from sunrise yellow to sunset red, and a resident gold-leaf specialist maintains the 24-carat gold leaf of the interiors.