A First Look at the UAE’s New National Museum

I n recent years, visual grandeur has become a hallmark of the United Arab Emirates. From commissioning the world’s largest carpet to upcoming plans for a performance featuring 10,000 light-show drones, the nation frequently celebrates the awe-inspiring. At first glance, the Zayed National Museum seems to perpetuate this aesthetic urge. Situated in the center of Abu Dhabi’s ambitious Saadiyat Cultural District, the museum is an architectural feat: five steel towers rise more than 370 feet to evoke the soaring wings of a falcon—the national bird of the UAE—from atop a giant man-made hill, which itself abstracts Emirati topography. Yet nothing about the institution, including the towers, exists to satisfy the eye alone.

Architect Norman Foster and his team were hyperconscious that, although a national museum can entice visitors through its appearance, to foreground dazzlement would be to betray its fundamental purpose. “A national museum is owned by the people,” says Gerard Evenden, the firm’s senior executive partner who has led the project from its origin. “[Visitors] go there to be sociable. At the British Museum, for example, people regularly go there to have lunch. It’s not about coming once. You want the nation to visit again and again.”

Instilling a sense of familiarity with and sensitivity to Emirati culture and history was central to achieving their goal. Although the design is unquestionably modern, its core inspirations, both in appearance and construction, are local traditional buildings. “If you look across the seven emirates, the older buildings are the color of their sand because they built them from what was there,” says Evenden. “So, very quickly, we had the concept that the building should come from the ground. It had to be earthed.” Saadiyat Island is flat, however, so the mound in which the museum is effectively buried needed to be fabricated. “It’s a high-tech cave, which also keeps the building cool,” he explains.

The exterior “wings” perform a complementary function. The tops of these towers are heated by sunlight, causing warm air from inside the museum to travel upward via the thermal stack effect towards flaps similar to those used on airplanes. When opened, these flaps expel the warm air. Simultaneously, underground pipes funnel fresh air from the exterior, passively cooling it before sending it throughout the building. Air conditioning thus effectively becomes unnecessary, except in those galleries which require temperature control for conservation purposes. The system nods to ancient architectural innovations such as the barjeel, a wind-tower design found throughout the region that similarly facilitates passive cooling.

This emphasis on purposefulness permeates the interiors as well. Long-lasting bronze ornamentation on and around the doors took precedence over paint, for instance. “The museum is a national landmark that will stand for decades to come,” says Evenden. “We were keen for it to age well, with carefully selected materials that acquired a patina over time—especially the elements visitors will touch and interact with.” In other words, human contact literally leaves a trace in this people’s museum.

Simplicity was key to the final design. Evenden recalls how their initial proposal to clad the walls in marble and include elaborate gilding—common features in many of the world’s grandest museums—was rejected. Echoing his firm’s belief that a national museum should reflect a country’s culture, the institution’s team made clear that its galleries should equally embody the attributes of the UAE’s founding father, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, after whom it is named. As the UAE’s first president, he governed from the country’s founding in 1971 until his death in 2004. Rising to power from a Bedouin background, he was widely respected for his wisdom on issues such as environmentalism and diplomacy, as well as for his magnanimity toward his people.

A museum in his honor needed to be the polar opposite of an opulent palace with an imposing aura. The vast atrium in particular seeks to greet visitors as a welcoming space, with areas set aside for performances, eating and congregating. “There is a humbleness to the design,” says Dr. Peter Magee, the museum’s director, who began his career in academia, leading archaeological excavations in the UAE. “You feel comfortable, and that this is a place for you, which reflects Emirati society.”

Magee also embraces this democratic intent in his curatorial vision, which extends back 300,000 years when archaeological evidence indicates human settlements existed in the area that is now the modern-day UAE. “It’s a museum of stories about people rather than about objects,” he explains. “Every object is carefully chosen because of the story it tells.”

In addition to the Abu Dhabi Pearl, which traces pearl diving in the UAE to at least 6,000 BCE, and five pages from the renowned Blue Qur’an (800-900 CE), one of the most significant objects in the collection is a recreation of an 18-meter-long Bronze Age magan boat. These vessels enabled the trade of copper from the UAE’s mountains, as well as textiles and semi-precious stones, between this area, Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley.

Taking instructions from an ancient clay tablet that lists materials needed for such a boat, along with archaeological evidence revealing construction techniques, specialists across the humanities and sciences built the ship using reeds, ropes and wood. The project, a collaboration between the museum and New York University Abu Dhabi, aims to preserve Emirati maritime heritage and deepen our understanding of life in the region 4,000 years ago. It also reflects the museum’s intentions to fund and champion research. Following four-and-a-half years of preparations, the magan boat was equipped with a goat-hair sail and passed two days of sea trials in 2024, traveling 50 nautical miles and reaching a speed of 5.6 knots.

“The magan boat is important not because of what it is but because of what it represents,” says Magee. Akin to the museum’s curatorial efforts, it points as much to the past as it does to the present and future of this relatively youthful nation. “From here, boats like this would sail out to the world. With goods come people, and with people come ideas. This has been a meeting point for global communities, and what we’re doing at Saadiyat Cultural District is a continuation of that. There is cultural memory here. The story is already interwoven in the sand.”