Home to the tallest skyscraper, the largest shopping mall and the longest driverless metro system in the world, Dubai adds another superlative to the list. It can now admire all its world record-breaking trophies through the biggest picture frame on the planet.





Dubai Frame

Rising 150 metres above Zabeel Park, encrusted with swirling golden motifs that glisten in the desert sunshine, the Dubai Frame has finally opened almost a decade after it was first designed.





The Frame is one of the more surreal silhouettes to have appeared on the city’s busy skyline in recent years, standing as a slender hollow rectangle visible for miles around, as an outline awaiting its content.

But the building has proven controversial for other reasons. The 50-storey portal may be the tallest picture frame in the world, but its architect wants to add another title to the stats: for him, it is the biggest stolen building of all time.





Fernando Donis, Dubai Frame designer

Original idea of frame belongs to Fernando Donis, the Mexican architect whose proposal won an international competition in 2008 for a “tall emblem structure to promote the new face of Dubai”,

organised by the German elevator company Thyssen Krupp in collaboration with the International Union of Architects (UIA), a Unesco-affiliated organisation that ran the competitions for the Sydney Opera House and the Pompidou Centre in Paris, the contest received over 900 entries from across the globe.





For the 2008 competition, Donis took it a step further. “Instead of another massive structure,” he says, “I proposed a void. Something that would frame all the other landmarks.”





The architect received his $100,000 prize and was flown to Dubai to be feted at a dinner with the crown prince, but he says that shortly thereafter he received a contract from the Dubai municipality that limited his involvement to an advisory role. It demanded that he hand over his intellectual property, never visit the construction site and never promote the project as his own work, while the municipality could terminate the agreement at any point. Donis says he refused to sign it, so they hired Hyder Consulting, a branch of Dutch engineering giant Arcadis, and went ahead without him.