Museum of the Future

What it is

The Museum of the Future opened on 22 February 2022 on Sheikh Zayed Road beside Emirates Towers. The form is a torus with a void through the middle, the facade is assembled from 1,024 panels bearing Arabic calligraphy, and there are no load-bearing columns inside.

The building is 77 metres tall with seven floors of exhibition space. Structurally it is a steel diagonal grid hung with facade panels — which is why there are no columns within and not a single right angle without.

The calligraphy is text rather than ornament: three quotations about the future, cut through the panels so that daylight enters through them and the lighting reads outward at night.

It stands between Emirates Towers and the Dubai International Financial Centre — the most expensive business node in the city, where the address was already expensive before the museum existed.

What it does to the district

First and most importantly: almost nothing to prices. This is the case where a landmark adds recognisability rather than value, and it is worth knowing that before a seller explains a premium for the view.

The reason is simple. A landmark lifts prices where it changes the function of a place: bringing people, jobs and transport. The Museum of the Future brings tourists for a few hours a day into a district already full of offices and traffic.

Second: the view. Apartments and offices with a direct outlook onto the building genuinely sell for more than neighbouring windows in the same tower, and that is an ordinary view premium, no different from one for the Burj Khalifa or the canal. It attaches to a specific unit, not to the district.

Third: short-term letting. A guest in Dubai for four days puts the museum on the list alongside the Burj Khalifa, and apartments within walking distance fill better. That works on nightly letting and barely at all on annual.

Who should care when buying

Anyone choosing between windows in the same building: the difference between an outlook onto the highway and one onto the museum is real money, and it is worth checking in person rather than on a render.

Anyone buying for nightly letting in Downtown, Business Bay or along the highway: proximity is an argument in the listing and the photograph that gets the booking.

And anyone buying for annual letting — hardly at all. A tenant who lives here and commutes from here does not pay extra to be near a museum.

What to check

Whether the view actually exists from your unit rather than from the next core: on Sheikh Zayed Road, windows in one building face fundamentally different directions.

Whether that view will survive. Plots along the highway are built on continuously, and an outlook that is open today can meet a new tower in three years. The plot’s planning position is checkable; a developer render is not.

And the size of the premium. If the view costs a double-digit percentage over the neighbouring unit without it, what is being bought is somebody else’s projection rather than a view.

How to tell a landmark that moves prices

Dubai has produced plenty of both over the past twenty years, and in hindsight the difference is stark.

Prices move for objects that change a resident’s daily routine: a metro station, a shopping centre with a supermarket, a school, a hospital, a promenade walked every evening. Their common property is that the people who live there use them, and use them regularly.

Prices do not move for objects visited once. An observation deck, a museum, a wheel, a fountain. They lift the recognisability of an address, supply the photograph in the listing and work on nightly letting, but they do not change the everyday value of a district.

One question settles which group an object belongs to: will you go there on a Wednesday evening after a year of living here? If not, it is a landmark rather than infrastructure, and the premium should be sized accordingly.