It’s an unparalleled oasis – five major cultural institutions by five top architects all on one small spot of land. No wonder it’s called “Happy Island,” writes Matthew Teller
Located just 500 metres off Abu Dhabi city, Saadiyat Island (“Island of Happiness”) is the largest single mixed-use development under way in the Gulf. At a modest 27 sq km – with 30km of water front – Saadiyat will be a visitor destination and a residential hub. By 2018, the island will be home to 29 hotels, apartments and villas, several marinas, and two golf courses – including the Gulf’s first ocean-front links, designed by Gary Player.
Grabbing the headlines, though, are the plans for the Cultural District. This will centre on five world-class institutions, most to be operated in partnership with established museums. All are designed by “starchitects”: the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi by Frank Gehry, the Louvre Abu Dhabi by Jean
Nouvel, a Performing Arts Centre by Zaha Hadid, a Maritime Museum by Tadao Ando and the recently announced Sheikh Zayed National Museum by Norman Foster.
The Tourism Development and Investment Company (TDIC) was set up to manage the development of real estate assets held by the Abu Dhabi government, and earlier this year its CEO, Lee Tabler, confirmed that around US$2.7bn had been spent on Saadiyat so far. It’s estimated that TDIC has another US$8.2bn in the pipeline, with a further US$16bn expected to follow from subdevelopers. With such astronomical sums being bandied about, Saadiyat represents urban development on the grandest of scales. www.saadiyat.ae
GUGGENHEIM ABU DHABI
Saadiyat’s flagship project is the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, designed by award-winning architect Frank Gehry. Due to open in 2011, it is set to join the growing network of Guggenheim museums (in New York, Las Vegas, Bilbao, Venice and Berlin) and at 30,000sqm, will be the largest of the lot. Around 12,000sq m will be given over to exhibition space, with permanent collections of contemporary art from around the world and galleries for special exhibitions. Included are a centre for art and technology, a children’s art education facility, archives, a library and research centre, and a state-of-the-art conservation laboratory. The cost is estimated at between US$200m and US$400m.
By commissioning Gehry, the Abu Dhabi authorities are consciously trying to emulate the success of the northern Spanish city of Bilbao, home to another Gehry Guggenheim. Before that museum opened in 1998, Bilbao was largely unknown. In the seven years that followed, the museum attacted an astonishing 9.1 million visitors, generating US$1.67bn in direct receipts. It also created more than 4,000 jobs, with a knock-on boom felt throughout the city. The Guggenheim put Bilbao on the map.
Bilbao has become a case study in how to use culture – and world-class architecture – to drive urban development. The Abu Dhabi authorities are unequivocal about their ambitions: “We would like to mirror, if not surpass, the achievement of Bilbao.”
FRANK GEHRY
Frank Gehry was born in Canada in 1929, but has lived in California since 1947 and is based in Los Angeles. His career took off with the design of his own residence in 1978. A series of high-profile commissions followed – notably the Vitra Design Museum in Germany (1989), the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain (1997) and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles (2003).Famous for buildings with rolling, warped bulges, Gehry has said of the Abu Dhabi project: “This had to be a new invention, [using] design… that would not be possible in the US or Europe.” www.foga.com
PERFORMING ARTS CENTRE
In addition to iconic museums, Saadiyat will also be home to a visually stunning Performing Arts Centre, designed by renowned Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid, who in 2004 became the first woman ever to win the Pritzker Prize – architecture’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize.
Hadid’s sleek, futuristic design – reminiscent to some of an insect’s wing, to others of a reptile’s head – takes the form of a 62-metre-high building housing five theatres: a concert hall situated above four lower theatres – a music hall, opera stage, drama theatre and a flexible theatre – with a combined seating capacity of 6,300. A huge window behind the stage will fill the concert arena interior with daylight and give dramatic views of the sea and city skyline. Local lobbies for each theatre will be oriented towards the sea, giving each visitor constant visual contact with their surroundings, while on the north side of the building, a restaurant will offer a wide, shaded roof terrace.
A controversial figure and, many say, under-represented by completed projects, Hadid has imagined a building perhaps bolder than any other on the Saadiyat site. Designers and architecture buffs are awaiting its completion with anticipation.
ZAHA HADID
Zaha Hadid was born in Baghdad in 1950. After studying in Beirut and London, she set up in practice in 1980, initially working chiefly on conceptual projects, few of which were realised. Hadid’s most eye-catching projects include a BMW plant in Germany (2005), a mountain railway at Innsbruck, Austria (2007) and the Aquatics Centre for the 2012 Olympics in London, all showing characteristic fluidity of form. Of her Performing Arts Centre she has said: “As it winds through the site the architecture increases in complexity, building up height and depth and achieving multiple summits in the bodies housing the performance spaces, which spring from the structure like fruits on a vine, facing westward toward the water.” www.zaha-hadid.com
MARITIME MUSEUM
The southern end of Saadiyat’s Cultural District is reserved for the Maritime Museum, designed by Japanese architect Tadao Ando and intended to showcase the history of sailing and sea-borne trade in the emirate and the Gulf region.
Ando’s elegant architecture begins with a unique space carved out of a simple volume, which he describes as being shaped by the force and fluidity of Abu Dhabi’s wind. This stands as a gate over a vast water court, where the two key landscapes of Abu Dhabi’s culture – land and sea – merge.
“Within the ship-like interior, ramps and floating decks guide visitors fluidly through the exhibition space,” says Ando, “echoing the theme of the museum and creating a dynamic gallery experience.” Below ground is a reception hall with an enormous aquarium, above which floats a traditional dhow, viewable from multiple perspectives.
To emphasise the simple but powerful shape of the building, Ando has organised the surrounding landscape in a grid. Rows of trees line the forecourt of the site, creating, as Ando puts it, “an oasis-like border [which] allows visitors to transition gradually between the dynamic city and the more serene and contemplative space of the museum.”
A completion date has not been announced, though it’s unlikely to be finished before 2013.
TADAO ANDO
Tadao Ando was born in Osaka, Japan, in 1941.
Despite winning the Pritzker Prize, he has never had any formal training in architecture, working early on in life as a truck driver and a boxer. Ando’s work is known for designs that follow landscape forms, using natural light to shape and heighten interior spaces often defined by reinforced concrete. He has worked predominantly in Japan, producing buildings such as the Church on the Water, Hokkaido (1988), the Church of the Light, Osaka (1989) and the Naoshima Art Museum, Kagawa (2004).
LOUVRE ABU DHABI
Saadiyat’s other “branded” institution is to be the Louvre Abu Dhabi, the first time that the famous Parisian museum has partnered an institution overseas. The landmark deal was facilitated by a 30-year cultural accord sealed in 2007 between the governments of France and Abu Dhabi: for a US$1bn fee (US$600m of which reportedly covered the right to use the Louvre name), Abu Dhabi gains expertise and access to art works from France’s most prestigious cultural institution.
The museum is to be designed by French architect Jean Nouvel, at an estimated cost of US$128m. Of the building’s roughly one-third of the 24,000-sq m building, will house galleries with permanent displays of archaeology,
fine art and the decorative arts from all historical periods, with large areas also set aside for temporary exhibitions. Long-terms loans from the Louvre and other French museums, including the Musée du Quai Branly, the Centre Pompidou, the Musée d’Orsay and the Palace of Versailles, will ensure a constant flow of art treasures.
Designed as a seemingly floating dome structure, Nouvel’s concept is a feat of engineering. Its web-patterned dome – “a form common to all civilisations,” he says – allows the sun to filter through with a diffuse, magical light “in the best tradition of great Arabian architecture.”
The museum is due to open in 2012.
JEAN NOUVEL
Born in France in 1945, Jean Nouvel rose to prominence when he won a competition in 1981 for a series of grands projets proposed by the then French president François
Mitterrand. Avowedly independent, and unaffiliated to any particular school or tradition of architecture, Nouvel is perhaps best known for his stunning design for the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris (1988), for which he won the Aga Khan Award for Architecture. He is also currently working on the iconic Landmark Millennium project in Beirut and a 45-storey tower in Doha. His design for Abu Dhabi, he says, owes much to Saadiyat’s natural surroundings: “The island offers a harsh landscape, tempered by its meeting with the Gulf – a striking image of the aridity of the earth set against the fluidity of the waters.” www.jeannouvel.com
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