Cultural Foundation

The comprehensive renovation of the Cultural Foundation puts a Bauhaus-lineage landmark to new use while keeping its expression, materiality, and atmosphere. Across 22,500 m², the heritage-listed building now houses public workshops, studios for an artist-in-residence programme, the Abu Dhabi Children’s Library, a performing arts centre with an 896-seat theatre, restaurants, and a rooftop terrace. It opened in 1981 as the first institution in the region devoted to arts and literature. 

The original design philosophy carries forward through a series of precise interventions. The first turns the central ground floor into an open hall for rotating exhibitions and events, connecting the interior to the surrounding park and inner courtyard. Along the facade line, the arched walkway draws visitors from the courtyard into the inner halls, its fine detailing and its carefully conserved play of light and shadow marking that threshold. 

The second extends the diagonal passage at ground level upward, into a vertical space open to the sky and aligned with Qasr Al Hosn Fort, the oldest building in Abu Dhabi. This opening loosens a compact, inward-looking volume and carries a staircase along one side, which passes the library’s themed floors and reaches the third intervention, a large public rooftop terrace with the Fort in full view. 

Conservation also preserved the building’s own climate strategy. The courtyards act as reservoirs of cool air, which the arcades draw into the inner halls, while the cool tones of the wall tiles temper the rooms and multi-toned floor tiles run from the courtyard into the interior. 

Guided by the architecture that first gave it form, the renewed Cultural Foundation brings exhibition, learning, and performance under one conserved roof, anchoring the cultural life of a rapidly growing city.