The backbone of complexity

Dubai’s Museum of the Future is widely considered the most architecturally complex building in the world – and 36,000 metres of Edgetech’s Super Spacer helped take it from blueprint to reality.

It’s set to be “an incubator for ideas, a driver for innovation, and a destination for inventors and entrepreneurs from all around the world”, according to its creator, UAE Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum.

When it’s finished, the eye-shaped structure will house a permanent exhibition of the world’s most cutting-edge technology and so it was only fitting that it took some of the world’s most cutting-edge technology to construct it, too.

A collaboration between architect Shaun Killa, engineers BuroHappold, BAM International and Affan Innovative Structures, the building’s outer skin consists of 7,000 custom-made IGUs engineered into intricate calligraphy forms. This features poetry from the prime minister, in Arabic, about the future. Inside those units are more than 36,000 metres of Super Spacer TriSeal Premium Plus.

Fernando Morante, Affan technical director, said: “Even if you’ve planned curtain walling for decades, you always start from scratch on a project of this complexity. In the ten years since we first used Super Spacer to make free-form IGUs in Abu Dhabi’s Sheikh Zayed Mosque, we’ve had no problems whatsoever. That meant that, when it came to this even more ambitious project, Super Spacer was the go-to product. Its flexibility and outstanding all-round performance have let us go to the very limits of what’s technologically feasible. With a rigid spacer, that would be virtually impossible.”