City Tower One, Seen as Part of the City

Written By Ahmad Alnaji

Ahmad Alnaji and SARAB Art Production photographed City Tower One, the 358-metre Pelli Clarke & Partners tower on Dubai's Sheikh Zayed Road, as part of the city around it rather than as an object on its own. ArchDaily published the series under the headline "Pelli Clarke & Partners' City Tower One and Dubai Cityscape Under the Lens of Ahmad Alnaji."

Architecture as part of a larger story: the city, the people, the environment

SARAB photographs architecture as part of a larger story, within the city, the people and the environment around it. A tower belongs to a skyline, to a road, to the people who pass it every day, and to the light that changes it hour by hour. Plenty of people have photographed City Tower One, usually the way towers get photographed, isolated and filling the frame. I wanted to do something else. The tower rises 93 floors on the west side of Sheikh Zayed Road, across from Emirates Towers and the Museum of the Future, and at sunset its facade turns pure gold. So I shot it from a distance, at that hour, with the city in front of it and the people of Dubai in the frame, because that is where the tower actually lives.

That choice is the whole point of the series. A 93-floor tower belongs to the skyline as much as to anyone who lives in it, and thousands of people see it every evening on their way home. Photographing it from far, glowing gold among the rest of the city, tells the truer story of what it is to Dubai, beyond what it looks like up close. The people in the frame give the tower its scale and its reason for standing there.

Pelli Clarke & Partners, the firm Cesar Pelli founded, designed City Tower One as part of a master plan meant to improve the experience along that stretch of Sheikh Zayed Road, tying the road to the streets behind it. The tower holds 608 residential units and completed in June 2026. Photographing it in its context is a way of respecting that intent, reading the design the way the architects thought about it.

ArchDaily's feature on the series

ArchDaily ran twenty-six of the photographs, written by Antonia Piñeiro, and framed the piece around the photography itself. That framing matters more than it sounds. Most architectural coverage treats photographs as illustration and puts the photographer in the credit line, so a publication building the story around how a tower was seen is rarer than it should be.

This is the lane SARAB works in. A clean frame of a tower is the easy picture. The harder and more honest one puts the tower back where it belongs, in the light and the life of the city around it. For City Tower One, that picture is gold, at sunset, with Dubai in front of it.

Read the ArchDaily feature: Pelli Clarke & Partners' City Tower One and Dubai Cityscape Under the Lens of Ahmad Alnaji

See the full City Tower One collection.

Ahmad Alnaji

Ahmad Alnaji is a fine art architectural photographer based in Dubai and the founder of SARAB Art Production, a studio that specializes in fine art photography of landmark architecture across the UAE, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. He studied architecture for three years before moving into photography, and he reads a building the way its architect designed it, which is why architecture firms tend to recognize their own thinking in his images. He prefers the title of artist over photographer.

His work treats a building as a subject worth a story rather than a record of how it looks, bringing fine art to cityscape, architecture, and hospitality photography through visual storytelling. SARAB created the fine art images of the Museum of the Future that the museum and the UAE Government Media Office used in official promotion of the building, photographed Wasl Tower by UNStudio inside and out, One Za'abeel by Nikken Sekkei, and Zayed National Museum by Foster + Partners, and was commissioned by Qatar Tourism to photograph Qatar's landmarks. Clients include Foster + Partners, UNStudio, Killa Design, Saudi Aramco, Dubai Tourism, and Qatar Tourism.

https://www.sarab.art
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