Architecture · Abu Dhabi
Reading time: 7 minThe studio that gave Dubai its most photographed building, the calligraphy-wrapped torus of the Museum of the Future, has turned to Abu Dhabi and to the home. Jumeirah Residences Al Maryah Island is a 186-metre tower designed to look weathered by the Gulf rather than built against it.
There is a reason to pay attention to Jumeirah Residences Al Maryah Island beyond its waterfront address, and it is the name of its architect.
The tower is the work of Killa Design, the Dubai studio founded by Shaun Killa in 2015, and the practice behind the Museum of the Future, the torus-shaped, stainless-steel-and-calligraphy landmark on Sheikh Zayed Road that has become, in barely three years, the single most recognisable building in the modern UAE. It is on the currency of attention, if not the coinage. When a studio with that on its record turns to a residential tower, the tower is worth a proper look.
Rising approximately 186 metres on the waterfront edge of Al Maryah Island, in the heart of Abu Dhabi’s financial district, the project is a branded residence under the Jumeirah name. And its central idea is a good one, carried over intact from the practice’s more famous work: a building that appears shaped by nature rather than imposed upon it.
The Killa signature: buildings that look inevitable
To understand this tower, it helps to understand what Killa Design actually does, because it is unusually consistent.
The Museum of the Future is not shaped like a building. It is a torus; a ring, a solid with a hole through it, clad in steel and inscribed with Arabic calligraphy, standing on a green mound as though it had grown there. Shaun Killa’s abiding interest is in forms that read as found rather than made: shapes that seem to obey natural law rather than the developer’s spreadsheet.
The Address Beach Resort, the twin-tower Address Jumeirah Gate, the same instinct runs through all of it. A Killa building tries to look inevitable, as if the site had produced it.
Jumeirah Residences applies that thinking to the one building type that most resists it: the residential tower, which is, by economic default, a stack of identical floors. Killa’s answer is to make the stack move.
A tower that ripples
The tower’s design abandons rigid vertical stacking. Each level subtly shifts and bends, so that the façade appears to ripple as it rises, balconies extending outward like carved strata, the building presented not as construction but as erosion, a form gradually shaped by wind and water and light.
That is the same conceptual move as the Museum of the Future, at a different scale: make a large object look as though a natural process produced it. On the museum it is a torus that seems geological. Here it is a tower that seems tidal.
And it does real work beyond the visual. The shifting floor plates and deep, sculpted balconies break up the building’s mass and, more usefully, manage its relationship with the sun; the deep overhangs and recessed glazing provide solar shading on an elevation that faces a great deal of Gulf light. On Al Maryah Island, a district defined by rectilinear commercial towers, a building that curves and self-shades is both an aesthetic contrast and a functional argument.
Amber, and light as a material
The most distinctive feature is the colour.
The façade is finished in warm amber and bronze metallic tones, and it is designed to change through the day: soft gold in the morning, deepening to amber at sunset, and at night becoming a softly illuminated vertical presence on the water. Bronze balcony detailing and recessed glazing add depth and shadow, so the elevation reads as a layered composition rather than a flat curtain wall.
This is the single most Gulf-appropriate decision in the building. Abu Dhabi’s defining light is the low, warm, raking sun of a coastal desert, and a metallic amber skin is engineered to catch that light rather than reflect it away, as the glass-and-steel towers around it do. Where the neighbours bounce the sun back at you, this one is designed to absorb it and glow.
It is worth noting that this is Killa’s calligraphy-torus instinct again, translated into colour: a building that wants to belong to its place rather than stand apart from it.
Terraces as structure
Inside the form, the organising idea is outdoor space.
Terraces here are not balconies bolted onto a slab; they are integral to the architecture, with each residence opening onto private outdoor rooms that extend the living space into the vertical plane. Floor-to-ceiling glazing dissolves the line between inside and out, and sky gardens and elevated planting punctuate the tower’s ascent, introducing greenery and pause and reinforcing the idea of a vertical neighbourhood rather than a single stacked block.
This is a sensible response to a real constraint. For much of the Abu Dhabi year, the outdoors is punishingly hot, and a genuinely usable private terrace, shaded by the building’s own sculpted overhangs, is a more valuable thing here than the same terrace would be in a temperate city. The architecture is, in effect, manufacturing shade so that the outdoor space it creates is habitable.
The hospitality question
As a Jumeirah-branded residence, the building folds hotel thinking into a residential frame: a sequenced arrival from waterfront promenade to lobby to elevated communal areas, wellness and fitness facilities, lounges and private social spaces, and circulation treated as architecture in its own right rather than as leftover space between apartments.
The branded-residence model- a hospitality name lending its service culture to a building people own rather than visit, is now one of the defining forms of Gulf development, and it is fair to be a little clear-eyed about it. What the resident is buying, alongside the apartment, is the Jumeirah standard: the concierge, the arrival, the sense of being looked after. Whether that justifies the premium is a question for the buyer, not the critic.
What can be said architecturally is that the model suits Killa’s instincts. A practice preoccupied with experience, with how a building is moved through and encountered, is well matched to a brief that treats lobbies and corridors as moments rather than utilities.
Frequently asked questions
Who designed Jumeirah Residences Al Maryah Island? Killa Design, the Dubai studio founded by Shaun Killa in 2015, best known for the Museum of the Future in Dubai.
Where is it? On the waterfront edge of Al Maryah Island, Abu Dhabi’s financial district.
How tall is it? Approximately 186 metres.
What defines the design? A sculptural, rippling form in which each floor subtly shifts; an amber-and-bronze metallic façade that changes tone through the day; deep sculpted balconies providing solar shading; integral terraces and sky gardens; and hospitality-led shared spaces under the Jumeirah brand.
What is a branded residence? A residential building operated under a hospitality brand, here Jumeirah, which lends its service standards and design philosophy to homes that are owned rather than rented as hotel rooms.
What else has Killa Design built? The Museum of the Future, the Address Beach Resort and the twin-tower Address Jumeirah Gate, among others.
Final thoughts
The Museum of the Future works because it does not look like a building. It looks like an object that arrived — a ring standing on a hill, wrapped in writing, obeying some law other than the one that governs office blocks.
Jumeirah Residences Al Maryah Island is an attempt to bring that same conviction to the place it is hardest to sustain: the residential tower, the most economically standardised structure there is. Killa’s answer — to make the floors move, to let the façade ripple, to finish it in a colour that drinks the Gulf light rather than deflecting it — will not turn a home into a museum. But it does something quieter and more useful. It makes a tower on a financial-district island look as though the water might have shaped it.
In a skyline built largely from right angles and mirror glass, that is a genuine contribution. It follows the same instinct Killa brought to Jumeirah Marsa Al Arab, another Dubai landmark shaped by water rather than against it.
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