The Glowing Night At Masdar City

Cool places can look just as cool at night as during the day. Masdar city, with its striking architecture, stays alive when the sun goes down.

Buildings with screens for daytime sun protection pop when the lights start showing through at night.

Angles against the sky and the wind tower, looming.

The curves of a terracotta apartment building.

The local shopping mall with lit up construction cranes across the street. More construction, a bit quieter and mysterious in the dark.

Welcome! The glowing sign leaves no doubt on your arrival at the pseudo future.

Desolation Around Abu Dhabi

Maybe it's the desert environment. Maybe new development. A feeling of empty space, desolation can be found everywhere in and around the UAE capital.

Downtown Abu Dhabi, open space.

Out in the residential neighborhoods and new commercial developments, big, empty expanses.

At the Sheikh Zayed museum, rows of seating, no sitters.

Highway truck parking, quiet. A camel racecourse, silent.

A street has been completed. Going someplace? Not sure.

Wandering Masdar City, A Sustainable Community

Abu Dhabi leans into the future with the pre-planned mini town of Masdar City. It's billed as a green, sustainable, renewable, carless, future, woke, cool, transformative, environmental, and any other forward, kind, neutral words one can use to describe a city that treads lightly or not at all on Mother Earth. Something like that.

Sustainable or not (right now, not is winning), the architecture is great. Signature, unique buildings dominate. You want to live and work there, just to enjoy the building eye candy.

Views of a wavy apartment building. Little blue, electric troll-y trams are supposed to move the peeps around.

The angles and textures are lovely and varied.

One of the signature elements of the city, the tall wind tower. Through natural convection, the tower sucks up hot air from the plaza, cooling the area. Looking up the core of the wind tower. Small dogs have been known to get sucked up and flown six stories in the air. Seriously. Seriously kidding. Watch your hat.

The place is still expanding, the dream ongoing.