Wasl Tower Photographed by SARAB | UNStudio's Dubai Landmark.
Wasl Tower, Inside and Out
SARAB set out to make the definitive fine art images of Wasl Tower, the latest Dubai Icon by UNStudio
Ahmad Alnaji and SARAB Art Production photographed Wasl Tower, the 302-meter UNStudio supertall on Sheikh Zayed Road in Dubai, across more than one phase of the building's life. SARAB is a fine-art architectural photography studio in Dubai founded by Ahmad Alnaji, and Wasl Tower is one of the most comprehensive bodies of work it has built around a single building.
The first phase was the exterior, and it ran through the Dubai summer, which is famous not only for heat, but the very high humidity during the night. Reading the twisting ceramic form as the light moved, because the terracotta fins catch it completely differently depending on the angle. The building is at its most striking at golden hour, when it shines in a deep golden hue, making it stand out against the skyline. When I released the exterior fine art images, they were licensed by five companies, including UNStudio, the architect; Wasl, the developer; and Mandarin Oriental, the hotel. When the firm that designed a building, the company that built it, and the brand that operates it all license the same photographer's images of it, that is three separate judgments landing on the same work, and it is something SARAB is proud of.
UNStudio then commissioned SARAB to photograph the interiors, and that shoot was harder. It fell on a rainy day with very limited light openings to work with, so I took what I could and came back again for the rest. The aim across both phases was the same, to tell the story of the design decisions behind the building. One of those decisions is the courtyard formed in the space between the tower and its parking structure, the kind of space most buildings overlook and UNStudio turned into somewhere worth standing. Conveying a decision like that in a single frame is exactly the problem fine art architectural photography exists to solve. The completed interiors became an editorial, architectural storytelling series, covered in the architectural press, including Architectural Record,Archinect, e-architect, Architects' Datafile, and Designboom, and credited to Ahmad Alnaji and SARAB.
The building earns that kind of attention. UNStudio, the Amsterdam studio of Ben van Berkel, gave Wasl Tower a form drawn from the classical contrapposto pose, so it appears to shift as you move past it. Its surface is the world's tallest ceramic facades, a dense field of terracotta fins engineered with the German firm Werner Sobek to shade the glass and cut cooling loads in the Dubai heat, lit at night so the whole envelope reads after dark. The tower stands almost directly across from the Burj Khalifa and holds the Mandarin Oriental Downtown Dubai across its upper levels.
Committing to a building at this depth, across seasons and two full phases, rather than shooting it once, is a deliberate choice. An architect spends years resolving how a tower meets its environment, and photographing it outside and in is how that full argument reaches people who will never read the drawings. SARAB holds the same standard on every project: the image has to earn the wall it hangs on, the way a photograph does in a museum. A technically correct frame that carries no idea does not. For a building like Wasl Tower, that is worth the humid nights and the return visits it took.
