Photos courtesy of Nigel Young/Foster + Partners.
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| Theme: Power of Dreams |
Design: Foster + Partners |
| Fabrication: Pico Shanghai; China Construction Eighth Engineering Division |
Size: 42,517 square feet |
| Client: The U.A.E. National Media Council |
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Exterior Design: Constructed of glimmering gold-colored steel, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) pavilion is rounded and curved to imitate the way scorching desert winds sculpt sand dunes in its seven countries. Like the dunes that inspired its design, the pavilion’s unique metallic surface creates an optical illusion of rippling in the wind. Rough and textured on its northern side, just as dunes are from bearing the full brunt of the wind, the pavilion’s southern side has a correspondingly softer veneer. The northern elevation is also more porous than its opposite end, thereby allowing natural light in to illuminate the interior.
Pavilion Summary: Visitors enter through a glazed ”lip” that parallels a stream of water flowing into the pavilion. Once inside, they experience a series of video presentations that act as a magic carpet to whisk them through the UAE’s transformation from an arid desert to a terrain of towering skyscrapers. The first of the presentations, a six-minute film called ”In the Blink of an Eye,” offers a recap of the UAE’s rapid development from an “Arabian Nights” past to a major architectural and economic oasis. Moving on in the next section, visitors meet Emiratis and learn about their diverse lives through an almost-disorientating arrangement of dozens of flat and cube-shaped monitors placed at varying heights in the darkened room. The third and final presentation, “Dream Journey,” portrays a young Emirati boy and a Chinese girl who fly through the present day UAE. Created by Disney’s Hong Kong studios, it uses a 19th century illusion known as “Pepper’s Ghost,” where real children seem to appear in the room, but who then magically morph into two cartoon versions of themselves, then glide over the UAE’s wonderland of soaring towers and artificial islands. Afterward, visitors pass through an information area inside the pavilion and a “Cultural Garden” showcasing indigenous arts.
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