Skip to footer

Culture under construction in the United Arab Emirates

A future-focused cultural district made up of four museums and a performing arts center will be built on a manmade island off the coast of Abu Dhabi by 2017.

|
Olivia Katrandjian
A model of The Louvre Abu Dhabi, to open in 2015.
  • By Olivia Katrandjian Contributor

| Abu Dhabi, U.A.E.

• A local, slice-of-life story from a Monitor correspondent.

The past is not even a distant memory in Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates. There is no past. There is only the present, and the promising future, now under construction.

The future-focused Manarat Al Saadiyat museum displays a model for a new cultural district made up of four museums and a performing arts center. The district, expected to be completed by 2017, is being built on Saddiyat Island, a man-made island about 500 yards off the coast of Abu Dhabi. It will include  Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, designed by Frank Gehry, composed of conical and rectangular towers; The Louvre Abu Dhabi, designed by Jean Nouvel, featuring a massive white dome with palm tree cutouts; and The Zayed National Museum, designed by Lord Norman Foster, with steel towers curved like birds’ wings.

The government hopes to draw tourists looking for culture amid beach luxury.

Get daily or weekly updates from CSMonitor.com delivered to your inbox. Sign up today.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Culture under construction in the United Arab Emirates
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-News/2012/0309/Culture-under-construction-in-the-United-Arab-Emirates
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe