‘Most beautiful building on Earth’ opens in Dubai

Roadside signboards described the museum — just minutes away from the world’s tallest construction, the Burj Khalifa — as the “most beautiful building on Earth” (Dubai Media Office)
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Updated 23 February 2022
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‘Most beautiful building on Earth’ opens in Dubai

  • While its contents are yet to be revealed, it will exhibit design and technology innovations

DUBAI: Dubai opened its Museum of the Future on Tuesday, a spectacular structure it is touting as the world’s most beautiful building.
The museum, a seven-story hollow silver ellipse decorated with Arabic calligraphy of quotes from Dubai’s ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al-Maktoum, and thousands of meters (yards) of LED lights, takes pride of place on Sheikh Zayed Road, the city’s main highway.

The "most beautiful building on earth" (Dubai Media Office)

While its contents are yet to be revealed, it will exhibit design and technology innovations, taking the visitor on a “journey to the year 2071,” organizers said.

Roadside signboards described the museum — just minutes away from the world’s tallest construction, the Burj Khalifa — as the “most beautiful building on Earth” ahead of its gala opening.

The opening ceremony was featured in New York's Times Square. (Dubai Media Office)

It is the latest addition to the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) collection of flashy architecture and comes after the $7-billion Expo world fair, featuring a swathe of futuristic designs, opened on Dubai’s outskirts on 30 September.
The UAE’s capital Abu Dhabi is home to a branch of the Louvre, whose license was extended by a decade last year to 2047 at a cost of 165 million euros ($186 million).

The Museum of the Future is now open to members of the public. (Dubai Media Office)

Since French President Emmanuel Macron opened the Louvre Abu Dhabi in late 2017, it attracted some two million visitors in its first two years, before Covid hit.
The wealthy UAE has made no secret of intentions to boost its soft power as a trading and tourism hub and to diversify its economy away from oil.
It has also sought to expand its space sector, sending its first astronaut into space in 2019 and a probe named “Amal” (Hope) into orbit around Mars in 2021 — the first Arab country to pull off such a feat.

 

 


‘One in a Million’: Syrian refugee tale wows Sundance

Updated 24 January 2026
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‘One in a Million’: Syrian refugee tale wows Sundance

PARK CITY: As a million Syrians fled their country's devastating civil war in 2015, directors Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes headed to Turkey where they would meet a young girl who encapsulated the contradictions of this enormous migration.

In Ismir, they met Isra'a, a then-11-year-old girl whose family had left Aleppo as bombs rained down on the city, and who would become the subject of their documentary "One In A Million," which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on Friday.

For the next ten years, they followed her and her family's travels through Europe, towards Germany and a new life, where the opportunities and the challenges would almost tear her family apart.

The film is by directors Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes. (Supplied)

There was "something about Isra'a that sort of felt to us like it encapsulated everything about what was happening there," MacInnes told an audience at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah on Friday.

"The obvious vulnerability of her situation, especially as being a child going through this, but that at the same time, she was an agent.

"She wasn't sitting back, waiting for other people to save her. She was trying to fight, make her own way there."

The documentary mixes fly-on-the-wall footage with sit-down interviews that reveal Isra'a's changing relationship with Germany, with her religion, and with her father.

It is this evolution between father and daughter that provides the emotional backbone to the film, and through which tensions play out over their new-found freedoms in Europe -- something her father struggles to adjust to.

Isra'a, who by the end of the film is a married mother living in Germany, said watching her life on film in the Park City theatre was "beautiful."

And having documentarists follow her every step of the way as she grew had its upsides.

"I felt like this was something very special," she told the audience after the screening. "My friends thought I was famous; it made making friends easier and faster."