Tony Abi Gebrayel walks through TeamLab Phenomena on Saadiyat, a building whose envelope was asked to do the one thing façades are not supposed to do: keep changing, like clouds, waves and dunes, while always remaining recognisable.
Abi Gebrayel set the scene on Saadiyat Cultural District in Abu Dhabi, where the government set out six iconic projects, the Louvre, the Guggenheim, the Zayed National Museum, the Abrahamic Family House, the Natural History Museum, and TeamLab Phenomena, the immersive-art work of the Japanese collective teamLab, known through the design as the Centre of Curiosity.
He was clear that he came at it as an architect, not a façade engineer, where façade specialists describe the challenges of solving a façade, he wanted to describe the challenge of setting one. And the challenge here was unusual: the envelope had to keep changing. Clouds, waves, dunes, mist, none of them ever holds a shape, he pointed out, and yet you always know exactly what they are. That question became the building.
The result is an envelope of some twenty-three thousand square metres in which roof, soffit and wall are a single continuous surface, an organic form visible from the sea and from the bridge into the city, reading less as a building with a façade than as one uninterrupted skin.
Behind the skin is teamLab’s immersive art, and the ambition of the envelope is to belong to it: an architecture that behaves like a natural phenomenon, recognisable but never quite still, which is exactly what makes it hard to draw, detail and build.