Instagram Favourite Places in Abu Dhabi

Al Bahr Towers Responsive Façade

Twin cylinders wrapped in 2,000 folding umbrellas — a mashrabiya that opens and closes with the sun.

Abu Dhabi

Aldar Headquarters (The Coin Building)

A 121-metre glass disc standing on its edge — the Middle East's first circular skyscraper, and its most-photographed silhouette.

Abu Dhabi

Capital Gate (The Leaning Tower of Abu Dhabi)

An 18-degree lean, four times Pisa's — a skyscraper built deliberately off-balance and held there by steel.

Abu Dhabi

Etihad Arena

A woven gold shell on the Yas Bay waterfront — shade by day, lantern by night, 18,000 seats inside.

Abu Dhabi

Flower Parent and Child by Takashi Murakami

Ten metres of gold leaf and grinning flowers on the waterfront — one of Murakami's largest works anywhere.

Abu Dhabi

Marsa Mina Murals

1,163 metres of painted wall along the old port — the longest continuous mural in the capital.

Abu Dhabi

Sheikh Zayed Bridge

Zaha Hadid's sine wave in steel — 842 metres of dune, lit in colour that flows across the spine.

Abu Dhabi

Souk Qaryat Al Beri Canals

Wooden abras threading man-made canals between an Arabian souk and a Venetian one, with the Grand Mosque across the water.

Abu Dhabi

The Emerging Man (The Giant)

An eight-metre head and two vast hands surfacing out of the Gulf, as though something enormous is climbing out.

Abu Dhabi

The Founder's Memorial — The Constellation

A portrait of Sheikh Zayed made of 1,327 floating solids that only resolves into a face from certain angles.

Abu Dhabi

The Humans by Fatspatrol

A hundred metres of black-and-white figures in profile — dreamers, visionaries and jokers on a nightclub wall.

Abu Dhabi

The Liwa Desert

The northern edge of the Rub' al Khali — the largest continuous sand sea on Earth.

Abu Dhabi

Tolerance by Eduardo Kobra

Two thousand square metres of kaleidoscopic portraiture wrapped around a building — the largest mural in the region.

Abu Dhabi

UAE Pavilion

A gold steel sand dune shipped from Shanghai in 60 containers and rebuilt, panel by numbered panel, on Saadiyat.

Abu Dhabi

Yas Bay Waterfront Art Trail

Twelve works along one promenade — Murakami, KAWS, four astronaut cats and a row of painted electrical substations.

Abu Dhabi