Excerpted from the book, Starchitecture. Scenes, Actors, and Spectacles in Contemporary Cities by Davide Ponzini and Michele Nastasi, published by The Monacelli Press, 2016.

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One significant large-scale project in Abu Dhabi is Saadiyat Island, a 10.4-square-mile development, which is in the process of creating about 30 hotels, 3 marinas, 8,000 villas and 38,000 housing units along over 12 miles of coastline. The project includes the creation of a Cultural District aimed for status as an icon in the international scene. One of the officers I interviewed stated, “Abu Dhabi is trying to use international contemporary architecture in order to express the newborn identity of the nation. ‘Abu Dhabi is a global capital city’ is the message, and it is certainly different from the mere business of Dubai!”

From the beginning, the creation of a collection of iconic buildings in a short period of time has been the driving idea behind Saadiyat Island. The concept of a new Cultural District for Abu Dhabi apparently occurred in a meeting between the Crown Prince and the then director of the Guggenheim Foundation, Thomas Krens.

Krens described the meeting as follows: “[the Crown Prince said] ‘What would you do?’ And so I did a drawing on a napkin at the hotel where we met. I said ‘Here’s the Guggenheim; here’s the Louvre; here’s the Maritime museum; here’s the national museum; here’s the opera house’ I basically sketched it all out, even the canal, because I wanted to have a grand canal’. He took the drawing and said, ‘Okay, that’s what we’ll do. Who are the architects?’

In the managers’ expectations, star architects were supposed to grant identity to the city and to endow their fame and style upon Saadiyat Island. The plan to collect different branded elements in a highly visible megaproject was also intended by the TDIC (Tourism Development & Investment Company) to distinguish Saadiyat Island in the overcrowded real-estate market.

Two years after the 2004 Gensler master plan for this area, the Booz Allen Hamilton consulting firm confirmed the advantages of creating a cultural district in order to attract tourists from around the world, based on the fact that the nearby Gulf cities did not have any exceptional cultural attractions. In 2006, SOM designed a canal along which pavilions were to be created in order to be complementary to five large cultural facilities along the coast.

The managing agency (Tourism Development and Investment Company) directly commissioned Frank Gehry for the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Museum, Jean Nouvel for an Abu Dhabi branch of the Louvre, Zaha Hadid for a performing arts center, and Tadao Ando for a maritime museum. Norman Foster was selected for the Sheikh Zayed National Museum in a competition with twelve other firms. For the pavilions along the canal, SOM, Greg Lynn, Hani Rashid of Asymptote, Pei-Zhu, Charles Correa, Shigeru Ban, Khalid Al Najar, and, once again, Frank Gehry were selected. One can see how names were used mainly for suggesting that this cultural district was going to be the largest and most branded in the world, despite the fact that the decision makers did not know whether they were all going to be realized or not.

This project embraced the “Bilbao effect” literally, involving Krens and Gehry, the protagonists of the Bilbao deed. The official description of the island reads “the only place in the world to house architecture designed by five individual Pritzker prize winners […] an irresistible magnet attracting the world to Abu Dhabi, and taking Abu Dhabi to the world.”

But most of the other parts of the Saadiyat Island megaproject postponed their completion dates due to various financial and planning factors; in early 2012, the TDIC announced a new strategy for delivering the cultural facilities. The Abu Dhabi Louvre Museum was expected to open by the end of 2015; the Zayed National Museum has an opening projected for 2016, and the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi in 2017. This staggering of releases is officially aimed at inducing visitors to come back and see the new cultural offerings throughout time, but it’s evident that the implementation of the original program encountered significant planning difficulties beyond recent economic constraints.