The Dubai Frame: the landmark whose only material is a view

DESIGN TRAVEL · DUBAI

Reading time: 9 min

Most tall buildings in Dubai are designed to be looked at. The Dubai Frame is designed to be looked through. It is one of the very few landmarks anywhere whose primary material is not stone, steel or glass but a view, and that makes it a far more interesting piece of design than its photographs suggest.

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The Dubai Frame opened on 1 January 2018 in Zabeel Park. It stands 150.24 metres tall and 95.53 metres wide, built as two towers joined at the top by a sky bridge, and it was delivered for around AED 160 million by main contractor Al Rostamani Pegel with Hyder Consulting advising.

The visitor route runs from a gallery about old Dubai on the mezzanine, up glass lifts inside the legs to a sky deck with a glass floor panel set into it, then back down through a tunnel imagining the city fifty years from now.

That is the description you will find on every listings page in the city, usually followed by how quick the lift is.

It misses the thing that makes the building worth writing about. The Dubai Frame is one of a very small number of structures anywhere in the world with no interior programme at its centre and no elevation that asks to be walked around. Its entire content is the city seen through it. Everything about it, from where it sits to which way it faces to how thin its legs are, exists to compose a picture that was already there.

That is an unusually pure design idea, and it came from an unusually good architect.

The idea was a void, and the void was aimed

Fernando Donis is Mexican, trained at the Architectural Association in London with a doctorate from TU Delft. He spent 2000 to 2008 at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture as a close associate of Rem Koolhaas, where he was the designer of the CCTV Headquarters in Beijing, and he founded his own practice, DONIS, in 2009. His work in the region also includes the Dubai Renaissance tower and the Porsche Design towers.

In 2009 his proposal won the ThyssenKrupp Elevator Architecture Award, an international competition organised with Dubai Municipality, taking first prize from 926 entries.

What he proposed was a void, held up in the air, to continuously frame the development of past, present and future Dubai.

It is worth sitting with how bold that was in 2009. The city was completing the tallest tower on earth. Almost every landmark being drawn at the time was an object competing for a silhouette. Donis proposed something that adds nothing to the skyline and instead selects from it. No spire, no crown, no gesture. A rectangle of nothing, placed with precision.

Ideas that reducible are rare, and they are rarer still in built form, because they only survive if the client believes in them as much as the architect does. Dubai Municipality took a competition-winning concept whose entire premise was emptiness and built it at 150 metres. That is not a small act of confidence in a design idea.

The facade earns its living

The Frame’s exterior is its most photographed feature and also its most technically ambitious.

Around 1,200 square metres of photovoltaic glass, in roughly 2,500 modules, supplied by the Spanish specialist Onyx Solar. The technology is amorphous silicon in a yellow gold finish, at about twenty per cent transparency, forming a 38 kilowatt peak system integrated into the cladding rather than added on top of it.

The transparency figure is the one to notice. It is what keeps a gold facade from becoming a solid wall. At twenty per cent the surface holds its colour and its pattern while still reading as something light passes through, which matters enormously on a building whose whole argument is about looking through things. The same glass filters ultraviolet and infrared, which in this climate does real work on solar gain before the cooling system ever sees it.

Building integrated photovoltaics at this scale, on a civic landmark, specified in the middle of the last decade, put Dubai ahead of most of the world in treating a facade as an active surface rather than a finish. It is easy to forget how unusual that was at the time.

Across the gold runs a ring pattern drawn from the Expo 2020 identity, which ties the landmark to the moment the city was building towards. The building was conceived long before that, and the facade is where it joins the wider story of what Dubai was preparing to show the world.

The result changes completely with the light. Early morning gives the gold a flat, matte quality and the aperture reads as a clean cut in the sky. By late afternoon the western face catches the sun directly and the whole rectangle turns molten, while the eastern face falls into shadow, so the two legs stop matching and the object gains a depth it does not have at noon. Photographers work at that hour for a reason.

The crossbar is where the engineering lives

The most impressive part of the Dubai Frame is the horizontal, and it is the part visitors think about least.

The sky bridge spans the full width between the towers at 48 storeys, weighing somewhere in the region of 3,000 tonnes. The load is carried on final slabs around 1.4 metres thick with roughly 3.5 metre cantilevers, transferred horizontally through steel beams into the legs below. Glass lifts run inside both towers.

Set into the middle of the bridge floor is a panel of glass roughly 25 metres long, so you can look straight down the outside face of the building to the park.

That panel is the one moment where the building lets you feel its structure rather than look through it. Standing on it you are reading the span, the cantilever and the height simultaneously, with nothing between you and the evidence of how it all works. Most observation decks go to considerable lengths to keep visitors away from any sensation of being held up. This one hands it over.

The towers themselves are deliberately quiet, and that restraint is exactly right. They are legs. Their job is to be slender enough that the void reads as the subject and they read as the support, and they do it well.

Where it points is the whole design

Because the Frame has no content of its own, its siting and its orientation are not context. They are the design.

Look north from the sky deck and you get Deira, Bur Dubai and the creek: the low, dense, fine-grained city of courtyard houses, wind towers, souks and warehouses that existed long before the skyline did. Turn around and you get Sheikh Zayed Road, Emirates Towers, Downtown and the Burj Khalifa.

Zabeel Park is the reason this works at all. The park is the open ground between the two Dubais, one of very few places in the city where you could raise a 150 metre aperture and have both halves of the story land cleanly inside it. Move the same object two kilometres in any direction and the composition falls apart.

So the decision that carries this building is not the gold or the glass floor. It is where the rectangle sits, which way it faces and what it therefore chooses to include. The Frame says everything it says by cropping, and cropping is a designer’s tool. It is the clearest possible evidence that the original idea was worth building.

It also explains why the Frame gives you something the taller viewpoints in the city cannot. Height gives you distance. From the top of a supertall tower, Dubai becomes a map. The Frame is deliberately low enough that both halves stay legible as places rather than patterns, and it puts them back to back so that you read them against each other. It offers a comparison rather than a panorama, and comparison is the more useful thing.

The sequence is doing more than it looks

The interior route is easy to underestimate, because on paper it sounds like a straightforward three-part narrative.

In practice it is a piece of sequencing that solves a real problem. If a visitor walks straight into the lift and out onto the sky deck, the view north is just an interesting neighbourhood. The Dubai Past gallery on the mezzanine, with its projections and its account of the fishing and pearling settlement the city grew from, teaches you what you are about to look at before you look at it. By the time you reach the glass, the creek has a story attached to it and the contrast with the southern view actually registers.

The Dubai Future tunnel on the way back down does the same job in the other direction. It sends you out through an imagined city rather than back through the one you have just seen, which leaves the sequence pointing forwards.

Sixty to ninety minutes covers the whole route comfortably. Capacity is managed at around 200 visitors an hour in groups of twenty, which keeps the sky deck civilised in a way that free-flow attractions rarely manage.

How to visit it well

A few things are worth knowing if you want the design to land rather than just the photograph.

Go late in the day. The low sun does the work on the gold, and the two views behave completely differently once the light is oblique. The creek side softens, the towers side sharpens.

Give the north view as long as the south. Almost everybody photographs the Burj Khalifa and glances at the creek. The northern view is the harder and richer of the two, and it is the half of the city that most visitors never actually walk through.

Stand on the glass panel properly. Walk out to the middle, stop, and look along the length of it rather than straight down. That is where you register the span.

Look at the frame itself from the park first. From ground level in Zabeel Park you can read the proportion, the slenderness of the legs and the transparency of the cladding, all of which disappear once you are inside it.

Entry is AED 50 for adults and AED 20 for children aged three to twelve, with under threes free and a fifty per cent reduction for seniors and people of determination. It opens daily from 9am to 9pm with last entry at 8.30pm. Access is via Gate 4 of Zabeel Park, and Al Jafiliya on the red metro line is the nearest station.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

The Dubai Frame is usually filed under spectacle, alongside the tallest tower and the largest flower garden, as another entry in a collection of superlatives.

It deserves better than that, because underneath the gold sits one of the most disciplined ideas anyone has proposed for this city. Build nothing. Place it exactly. Let the view do the talking.

Stand on the glass, look north at the creek, then turn and look south at the towers, and notice that the building has done almost nothing except decide where you stand and which way you face. A hundred and fifty metres of engineering in service of a single act of composition.

That is the whole design, and on the evidence of the view, it was a very good one.