Promoted by the Department of Culture and Tourism, the museum is a cornerstone of the ambitious museum complex on Saadiyat Island, redefining the city’s skyline. Designed by the architecture studio Norman Foster + Partners, it is dedicated to the history of the United Arab Emirates and its founder, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, the great driving force behind the unification of the country.
The ZNM houses 53,000 sqm spread over three levels: a basement and a garden that connect the museum to its neighbours: Louvre Abu Dhabi and the national Natural History Museum. It comprises six permanent galleries and, authored by the firm Gallagher Design, the Al Masar Garden that tells the story of the sheikh, also the first president of the Emirates, through the landscapes that inspired his life and form such an integral part of the country’s history.
Empty’s tasks focused on the four galleries or main exhibition areas located on the top level and the nodal spaces connecting them, as well as the entire museographic project for
the garden. In response to the aim to convey a meaningful sense of this history to citizens and visitors, these areas are named:
- To Our Ancestors
- Through Our Connections
- By Our Coasts
- To Our Roots
The galleries are suspended from large structural walls that generate a warm and welcoming space of interconnection on the ground floor. This space is reinforced by a large light-filled atrium formed by the wings of the building, which contribute to the redefinition of the Saadiyat Island skyline.
Empty was responsible for the technical development of the project and the production of the museographic resources, including display cases, exhibition furniture, replicas, reproductions and scenographies, graphics, AV equipment, mounts and installation of the artefacts.
In the garden, the work focused on the development and fabrication of the organic information tables—made out of concrete reinforced with fibreglass—, sculptures that evoke different local seeds, site scale models and graphic elements.
