ADGM Building (Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange)
A glass hall the size of a football pitch, lifted 27 metres into the air on four granite piers above a circular pool.
The ADGM Building — originally designed and built as the headquarters of the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange, and now the seat of Abu Dhabi Global Market — is the centrepiece of ADGM Square on Al Maryah Island, formerly Sowwah Island. It is the most sculptural object in Abu Dhabi's central business district, and the reason the surrounding plaza works at all.
The building and the wider complex were designed by Chicago practice Goettsch Partners, who won a limited international competition against four other firms, for master developer Mubadala Real Estate & Infrastructure. The complex was completed around 2011–2012 and comprises the exchange building plus four Grade A office towers of 31 and 37 storeys, totalling over 290,000 square metres of office space, with two levels of retail beneath.
The exchange itself is a four-level, roughly 21,650-square-metre glass-enclosed hall with a roof about the size of a football pitch. It is raised some 27 metres above ground on four massive granite piers, which carry the stairs, mechanical risers and service elements, leaving the volume between them open. Beneath sits a water feature roughly 49 metres in diameter. The surrounding towers use the same logic — each is core-supported and lifted clear of the ground so that its lobby floats above a transparent base — and the effect at plaza level is a large shaded public square where the buildings barely touch the site. Goettsch has said the shading of that plaza was the generating idea of the whole scheme.
The complex is LEED Gold design certified and won the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat's Best Tall Building award for the Middle East and Africa region in 2013. In 2015 the building was renamed following ADGM's fifty-year lease from Mubadala. The plaza, water feature and retail levels are publicly accessible; the exchange interior is not.
Exhibo editorial
Abu Dhabi's financial district could have been an atrium and a security desk. Instead the buildings were all told to get off the ground, and the result is the only place in the city where a business plaza is genuinely pleasant to stand in at two in the afternoon in June.
That is the whole trick, and it is worth naming: the shade came first and the architecture followed. Four towers hoisted onto their cores, a glass hall parked twenty-seven metres up on stone legs, and underneath all of it a square that stays cool because nothing is sitting on it. Look up from beside the pool and you are essentially standing inside a very expensive parasol. Come at dusk in the cooler months, when the office crowd has thinned and the glass overhead picks up the last of the light off the Gulf — the building stops being finance and turns briefly into a very large lantern on legs.
How to find it
On Al Maryah Island in ADGM Square, immediately adjacent to The Galleria mall and the Rosewood Abu Dhabi hotel. From The Galleria, exit towards the waterfront promenade and the square opens up ahead — the glass hall on its four granite piers is unmistakable at the centre, ringed by the four office towers. Walk right underneath it and around the circular water feature for the best view up into the structure. The plaza is open to the public; the exchange interior is not.
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