Dubai's $136M Museum of the Future will be full of robots and their inventors
Dubai, center of some of the world's flashiest architecture, is getting a high-tech new museum that looks straight out of the Jetsons. Plans for the Museum of the Future, unveiled by the government of Dubai earlier this week, show an ovoid ring of a building that looks like a hollowed out, giant version of Anish Kapoor's reflective Chicago sculpture Cloud Gate.
The museum will showcase technological innovations from cars to robots to drones, with some holograms thrown in for good measure (if the promotional video is to be believed).
Designed to be a research center as well as a tourist attraction, Dubai officials hope it will serve as an innovation hub for scientific and technological discovery for entrepreneurs near Dubai's downtown financial district.
It will offer courses in design and entrepreneurship, according to the state-run WAM Emirates News Agency. The shiny promise ring of a cultural destination will feature large-scale poetry carved into its metallic facade—written by the ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum. (You can check out his body of literary work on his website.)
Judging by renderings of the proposed interior, it looks like these words, etched into the building, will be the only transparent element of the windowless facade, presumably as a passive cooling method in the city's extreme desert climate. According to WAM, parts of the building will be fabricated with 3-D printing.
"The solid element of the building symbolizes what we know today representing what we know to be the future, and the void represents what we don’t know," the Dubai-based architect building the project, Sean Killa, told Al-Arabiya News.
Construction on the $136 million project starts this week, and is scheduled to wrap up in 2017. [via The Wall Street Journal, Al-Arabiya News]
