A 150-metre gilded picture frame with a glass floor, positioned so old Dubai is on one side and new Dubai on the other.
Opened in 2018 in Zabeel Park, the Frame is 150 metres tall and 93 metres wide, clad in gold-coloured stainless steel in a pattern derived from the Expo 2020 logo. It is exactly what it looks like: a picture frame, at urban scale, sited deliberately.
Stand at the top and look north and you see the old city — Deira, Bur Dubai, the Creek, low buildings and minarets. Look south and you see Sheikh Zayed Road, the Burj Khalifa and the towers. The building’s entire argument is that Dubai turned from one into the other inside a single lifetime, and it makes it more effectively than any museum here does.
The glass bridge
The 93-metre span between the two towers has a section of floor that turns from opaque to transparent as you walk over it, 150 metres up. It is a good trick and it produces a reliable amount of nervous laughter.
Inside
The ground floor holds a short exhibition on Dubai’s past, and after the sky bridge you descend through a projection-based Future Dubai gallery imagining the city decades ahead. Both are brief and neither is the reason to come.
The design dispute
The Frame was the subject of a lengthy legal dispute. The Argentine-Mexican architect Fernando Donis won an international competition in 2009 with the design, and later sued, saying he had been excluded from the project’s realisation and not credited or paid appropriately. He won a ruling in his favour at the World Intellectual Property Organization in 2016 concerning the patent.
The municipality has generally not featured his name. It is a live argument about authorship and it is not mentioned anywhere on site.
Practicalities
Tickets are inexpensive by Dubai standards and are the best-value view in the city — a fraction of the Burj Khalifa, with a more interesting composition.
Book online for a small discount. It gets busy at sunset. Zabeel Park around it is a large, genuinely used public park with a small charge to enter at the gate, and is pleasant in winter.
The metro station is a ten-minute walk in heat that, for six months of the year, makes a taxi the sensible choice.
More Landmarks
Burj Khalifa
The tallest building in the world by a margin nothing has yet threatened, with three observation levels at three quite different prices.
Burj Al Arab
The sail-shaped hotel on its own artificial island, which you cannot enter without spending money, and can photograph for nothing.
Palm Jumeirah
Ninety-four million cubic metres of dredged sand in the shape of a palm tree, now a suburb with a monorail.