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.
The Aldar Headquarters is a circular skyscraper at Al Raha Beach on the mainland edge of Abu Dhabi, completed in 2010 as the head office of developer Aldar Properties. Standing roughly 110 to 121 metres over 23 storeys, with a diameter of about 121 metres and some 61,900 square metres of floor space, it was the first circular building of its kind in the Middle East and is widely known locally as the Coin Building.
It was designed by MZ Architects under principal Marwan Zgheib, with Arup as engineer, Josef Gartner on the façade and Aldar Laing O'Rourke as contractor. The form is not a sphere but a disc: two convex circular glass façades joined at the perimeter by a corrugated connecting strip, so that the building reads as a full circle head-on and as a lens in profile. Zgheib's stated reference was the clam shell — a shape carrying real weight in a city whose pre-oil economy ran on pearling — alongside the circle's associations with unity and stability.
The structure is a diagonal steel grid, or diagrid, running around the envelope and transferring load to the foundations, supported internally by two concrete cores. The diagrid eliminates internal columns entirely, freeing open-plan floors; the glazed skin is assembled from triangular panels that curve with the geometry. Wind performance was tested on a 1:400 scale model fitted with roughly 350 pressure taps. The building was developed to LEED principles and has collected a series of international awards, including Best Futuristic Design at the Building Exchange conference.
The building is an operating corporate headquarters. Its ground level holds some retail and food and beverage, but the offices above are private; for most visitors it is a landmark seen from the Abu Dhabi–Dubai highway and the Al Raha waterfront.
Exhibo editorial
Scale collapses in the desert. That is the first thing anyone who has driven the E11 will tell you — distances lie, and objects that ought to resolve at a kilometre stay stubbornly abstract until you are nearly on top of them. The Coin exploits this shamelessly. It appears as a bright disc floating somewhere over the road, holds that reading for far longer than it should, and only becomes a building in the last thirty seconds of the approach.
There is a reason people photograph it head-on and almost never from the side. Face it and you get the icon: a perfect circle, weightless, faintly absurd. Step around it and the illusion goes flat — you can see it is a disc, that it has an edge and a thickness, that a very large amount of Arup's arithmetic went into keeping a shape this daft standing up. Both views are worth having. The first is the one the city put on its postcards; the second is the one that explains why it works.
How to find it
At Al Raha Beach on the mainland, directly beside the Abu Dhabi–Dubai highway (E11) roughly midway between Yas Island and the city island — you pass it on the right heading into Abu Dhabi from Dubai. For the classic head-on circular view, approach from the highway side or the Al Raha waterfront promenade opposite. Ground-floor retail and cafés are publicly accessible during business hours; the offices above are not.
Similar places
All places
Related stories
Threads of Heritage: Batima Zaurbekova's Woven Legacy
A survey of Kazakh tapestry pioneers redefines fibre art at Almaty's Kasteyev Museum
Eight decades after her birth, Batima Zaurbekova's textile innovations take centre stage in a major retrospective that bridges Central Asian craft and contemporary visual culture.
The Word for Beautiful Was the Word for Moon
The moon has been the measure of a beautiful face in Arabic verse for fifteen centuries — but beauty was only one of the things that light was ever asked to carry. A history of one disc, from a pre-Islamic ode to a glowing sphere over an Abu Dhabi harbour.
Ya qamar — you moon — is the oldest compliment in Arabic, and almost nothing about it means what we assume. The moon it praised was not always a woman, not always even a kindness, and in the end not only about beauty at all.
Frieze Abu Dhabi Unveils Roster for Inaugural West Asia Fair
The publisher's first West Asian venture brings global heavyweights and regional pioneers to Saadiyat Island
Frieze debuts in Abu Dhabi with an 84-gallery roster, shifting focus from local development to transnational exchange ahead of its November launch.