Museum of the Future

Mattar Bin Lahej

Historical figure

b. 1968

Mattar Bin Lahej, born in Dubai in 1968, is one of the Emirates' most recognisable living artists — a self-taught painter, sculptor, photographer and calligrapher who has spent nearly four decades pulling Arabic script off the page and into three dimensions. His instinct has always run toward art in public space rather than the gallery wall: monumental sculpture, light, steel, and a calligraphy he treats as form and movement as much as language. He founded Marsam Mattar, the first artist-run gallery in the UAE, and developed his own contemporary letterform, the "Mattar Font", which loosens classical Arabic letters toward abstraction. His work has shown in the UK, the US and across the Gulf. He is most widely known for the 14 kilometres of thuluth calligraphy wrapping the Museum of the Future — a commission he describes as the moment his whole career had been building toward. He chose thuluth deliberately, for what he calls its majesty: a script that, in his words, instils awe even in those who cannot read it. The result earned the building its nickname, "the only building that speaks Arabic". For Bin Lahej the project sits exactly on the line his practice has always walked — heritage carried forward rather than embalmed — and, as he puts it, he reached an international stage without ever leaving home.

Shaun Killa

Historical figure

Shaun Killa is a South African–born architect whose buildings have shaped much of how Dubai presents itself to the world. Educated at the University of Cape Town, he moved to the Emirates in 1998 — his first job there was on the interiors of the Burj Al Arab — and spent sixteen years as Director of Architecture at Atkins before founding his own studio, Killa Design, in 2015. His work argues consistently that a landmark and a low-carbon building can be the same thing: his Bahrain World Trade Centre was among the first towers in the world to integrate large-scale wind turbines into its structure, and that marriage of spectacle and environmental engineering has become his signature across towers, hotels and masterplans. His best-known building began as a single late-night sketch. Invited into the 2014 competition for the Museum of the Future, he worked for weeks before clearing the page and drawing the torus, the calligraphy and the landscaped podium in one gesture. He also fought for its location, insisting it sit directly on Sheikh Zayed Road rather than tucked behind Emirates Towers — the difference, as he put it, between a fraction of the city noticing it and all of it. The hand sketch became a column-free steel diagrid, refined through parametric modelling and built with robotic fabrication, and the finished ring is now among the most photographed buildings anywhere.