Frank Gehry once said that for him architecture and sculpture were the same thing. The remark was not a stylistic manifesto, nor was it a description of the visual effect of his buildings. It described the way he worked: a method in which a building is born not from a plan but from a volume that the architect shapes with his own hands before passing it on to the engineers. On Saadiyat Island in Abu Dhabi, this method has had the rare chance to unfold twice, in two late works by the same author standing next to each other: the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, due to open at the end of 2026, and Dar al Funoon, announced on 25 June 2026 and promised for 2030. One is built for the static contemplation of visual art, the other for sound that exists in time. Both were made by the same hand and on the same principle.
The Method
Gehry began work on a building not with a plan but with a sketch. He called his drawings “scribbles”: the lines did not describe walls but movement and silhouette. After that, dozens of physical models were built in the studio out of paper, cardboard, foam, wood, and fabric. The architect crumpled, folded, tore, and twisted the material, working with his hands the way a sculptor works with clay. Only once the volume had settled into a model did engineers digitise it using CATIA, software originally developed for designing aircraft.
This inverts the usual architectural process. In the conventional sequence, geometry comes first, and material follows. In Gehry’s, material comes first — or more precisely, the behaviour of the material under the hand — and the geometry is pulled in after it. His 2005 cameo on “The Simpsons”, in which he crumples a sheet of paper and shouts “That’s it!”, was a joke with a real basis. Critics have compared his methodology to Pollock’s drip paintings and his models themselves to the sculptures of Richard Serra.
This sequence explains why Gehry’s buildings look the way they do. A curved surface, in his work, is not a decorative decision but the trace of a gesture: the paper was folded exactly that way, the fabric fell into exactly that crease. The building retains the memory of the moment when it was shaped by hand.
A Point of Origin: Bilbao
Before turning to Abu Dhabi, it is worth recalling where this method first worked at full strength. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, which opened in October 1997, was the first time Gehry’s sculptural method unfolded at the scale of a major public building. At that point, Bilbao was still an industrial port in crisis: the shipyards were closing, the metallurgical industry was leaving, the population was shrinking. The museum was conceived as a bet, an attempt to lift the local economy through cultural tourism. The bet paid off, and the building gave its name to what is now a standard term, the “Bilbao effect”.
The shell of the museum is assembled from approximately 33,000 titanium tiles, each only about a third of a millimetre.
Gehry himself called the titanium cladding “the skin of the building”. The tiles were laid in a traditional roofing pattern with overlap, like fish scales: a decision that came out of craft rather than out of any high-tech analogy. The museum stands on the Nervión river, on the site of former shipyards; The New Yorker’s nautical metaphor was no accident. A sculpture on which a building rests.
This recap matters as a point of origin. When Abu Dhabi began building its own cultural programme on Saadiyat Island more than two decades ago, Bilbao was the reference, and the architect chosen to design twice on the new island was, fittingly, its author.
Guggenheim Abu Dhabi: Cones and Courtyards
Gehry received the commission for the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi more than twenty years ago; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation began work on the project in 2006. Construction broke ground in 2011, and after several delays, the museum is now scheduled to open at the end of 2026.
At roughly 30,000 square metres, it will be the largest Guggenheim in the world.
The sculptural language here is different from Bilbao. Instead of a single scaled, flowing shell, there is a cluster of several asymmetrical cones and cuboid volumes gathered around a common courtyard. Gehry described the composition as a “collection of disparate parts” pulled together into a single, dynamic whole. The cones are not decoration, and they are not a stylised quotation of Middle Eastern architecture. They function as a climatic system.
The logic came from observation. In an interview with “The New York Times”, Gehry recounted how he realised that people in Abu Dhabi preferred being outdoors to sitting inside air-conditioned spaces, and how he began looking for a way to cool the outdoor courtyards themselves. The answer came from the form of a tepee, the indigenous American tent through which hot air escapes upward. He crumpled a few sheets of paper, placed them around the model as placeholders, and out of those paper tepees the building’s cones eventually grew. Under one of them, by his own account, the temperature drops “at least fifteen degrees”.
This is a characteristic Gehry move: a technical problem solved through a sculptural gesture, and vice versa. The cones extract heat, cast shade, set the entry ritual and, at the same time, give the building its most recognisable silhouette. The same principle as in Bilbao: form arrives from the material and from the hand, not from a stylistic programme.
Inside, there are four floors of galleries, clusters of rooms around a central atrium, glass catwalks linking them, and flexible spaces designed for large-scale commissions and formats that move beyond the classical white cube. Gehry has said more than once that what interested him most in the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi was the sense of a non-monotonous, non-linear movement through space. Stephanie Rosenthal, the project’s current director, has confirmed it directly: the collection is being arranged not chronologically but “somatically”, through a bodily route across the building.
Dar al Funoon: Fabric Instead of Cones
A few years later, next door to the Guggenheim, Dar al Funoon will open as a centre for the performing arts. The building is presented as a cluster of pale, billowing forms drawn around the main halls like fabric. The official description adds the image of a shell cascading over the heart of the site. Inside, four stages of different scale: a 2,000-seat symphonic hall, a 3,500-seat open-air amphitheatre, a 400-seat experimental studio and a 250-seat chamber venue.
The principal difference from the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi is the plasticity of the shell. There, the sculptural composition is assembled from discrete volumes: each cone is a self-contained figure, with courtyards, joints, and shadows in between. Here, the strategy is the opposite: a single continuous fold draped over the halls like a cloth. If the Guggenheim reads as an assembled cluster, Dar al Funoon reads as a single stretched piece of fabric. The sculptural method is the same; the outcome is different. Instead of a collection of figures, one large figure.
The material shifts as well. At the Guggenheim, the exterior is dominated by the light volumes of the cones and the cuboid blocks; at Bilbao, by titanium reflecting light off a metallic surface. At Dar al Funoon, by a pale, almost sun-bleached shell that behaves like cloth: matte rather than glossy, transmitting rather than reflecting light. The stated source of the form is the rhythm of the local landscape, the movement of wind and water. The folds of the shell can be read as drapery, as the trace of a footstep across a dune, or as the amplitude of a sound wave. A horizon-building, not a tower-building.
The climatic strategy also shifts. At the Guggenheim, Gehry solved the heat through cones acting as chimneys and through shaded courtyards.
At Dar al Funoon, the answer comes through the cascade of the shell itself and through a glass façade: rehearsals, the assembly of a performance, and the movement of people backstage are visible from the seafront. A concert building is public in a different way from a museum. People do not come once to see an exhibition; they come continually, and often not for the concert itself. Hence the five thousand square metres of restaurants and retail designed for year-round footfall, and a programme running 365 days a year.
Sculpture and Sound
The most substantial difference between the two buildings is not the shell but what sits beneath it. The Guggenheim Abu Dhabi is a museum: a space for static contemplation. Dar al Funoon is a concert building: a space for sound that exists in time and demands precise acoustic geometry. This changes how the sculptural method has to work.
The acoustics at Dar al Funoon are being handled by the Japanese firm Nagata Acoustics. Dr Yasuhisa Toyota, whose credits include the Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Elbphilharmonie, came out of semi-retirement for the project. The outer shell can be as sculptural as the architect likes; the halls inside have to be calculated to the millimetre, and that task belongs to a separate engineering tradition, not to the architect.
This division of labour is Gehry’s own inheritance. At the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, he worked with Toyota back in 2003 on the same model: free sculptural plasticity in the steel sails outside, a rigorously calculated “vineyard” hall inside with the orchestra placed near the centre. The sculptural gesture and acoustic precision do not contradict each other; they occupy different layers of the building. At Dar al Funoon, the same two-layer logic returns in a new material.
At the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi the inner task is different: not sound but viewing. There, too, the sculptural method stays on the outside and gives way, inside, to a gallery logic: clusters of rooms around the atrium, catwalks, flexible spaces for large installations. What from the outside reads as an assembly of disparate cones turns, inside, into a route the visitor walks “somatically”.
What They Share
The Guggenheim Abu Dhabi and Dar al Funoon are not divided by geography or by material; between them there runs a single, continuous method. First the line in a sketchbook, then the model crumpled and folded by hand, then the aerospace software that turns a soft fold or a crushed paper tepee into an engineered surface. In Bilbao, the result took the form of a titanium skin; at the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, a cluster of cooling cones; at Dar al Funoon, a fabric-like mattness. In each case the building reads as an object that was sculpted first and built afterwards.
These two projects close the cultural programme of Saadiyat Island. The Louvre Abu Dhabi opened in 2017, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi is scheduled for the end of 2026, and the Zayed National Museum is to follow. Dar al Funoon will be the last major component of the programme, standing next door to the Guggenheim that Gehry also designed. The architect whose sculptural architecture once gave rise to the “Bilbao effect” had the rare chance, on a single island, to set two of his late buildings side by side: one responsible for the visual side of the cultural experience, at the Guggenheim, and one for the performative side, at Dar al Funoon.
During his final visit to Abu Dhabi, Gehry saw the Guggenheim nearing completion and personally presented the model of Dar al Funoon to UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan. It was his last working visit to the city that had entrusted him with its two largest cultural buildings. Gehry continued to shape his models by hand into his final years; both of the Saadiyat buildings are made on the same principle as his first great museum, almost thirty years earlier.
Architecture as sculpture is not a rhetorical figure.
It is the description of a process in which a building emerges from a gesture, and in which the trace of that gesture remains in the finished structure.
© Julia Smolenkova
© OpenSpace
