Abu Dhabi has added a stage to its island of museums. On 25 June, the Department of Culture and Tourism – Abu Dhabi announced that work had begun on Dar Al Funoon Abu Dhabi – “the house of the arts” – a performing arts centre rising beside the Saadiyat Cultural District and scheduled to open in 2030. Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, attended the launch and reviewed the plans.

The venue is conceived on a civic scale. Under one roof it gathers a multipurpose hall seating more than 2,000, a 3,500-seat open-air amphitheatre, a 400-seat studio theatre and a 250-seat jazz venue – a combined capacity beyond 6,000. The brief is broad by design: concerts and recitals, dance and ballet, opera and theatre, and stand-up comedy, programmed across the calendar rather than in seasons.

The building is the work of Frank Gehry, and one of his last. The architect, who died in December 2025 at 96, also designed the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi nearby, along with the Guggenheim Bilbao, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. For Dar Al Funoon he turned to the landscape itself – the movement of wind and water – translated into a billowing, fabric-like exterior that folds over the site. A transparent façade is meant to draw the public toward the work happening inside, rather than seal it away.

Dar Al Funoon will sit within one of the densest concentrations of cultural institutions anywhere. Saadiyat already holds the Louvre Abu Dhabi, the Zayed National Museum, the Natural History Museum Abu Dhabi and teamLab Phenomena, with the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi due to open later this year. The Department of Culture and Tourism frames these not as separate attractions but as a single network – a cultural ecosystem the performing arts centre is intended to complete.

What the centre promises beyond the architecture is permanence. Authorities describe it as a standing home for live performance at an international level, built to support long-term artistic residencies, touring partnerships and co-productions with companies abroad. That is a different proposition from a festival or a touring stop: a place with its own programme, its own resident talent and a remit to develop both.

Mohamed Khalifa Al Mubarak, chairman of the Department of Culture and Tourism, described the project in plain terms. “Dar Al Funoon is a place, really, for all,” he said – a hall for Emirati and Arabic voices alongside international names, and for emerging artists alongside established ones. He sketched a programme that might hold Ludovico Einaudi or Max Richter at the piano, touring productions of *Hamilton* and *The Wizard of Oz*, and comedians from Dave Chappelle to local performers. The investment figure was not disclosed.

The announcement reads as a continuation of a longer strategy rather than a departure from it. Abu Dhabi has been a UNESCO Creative City of Music since 2021, and the performing arts already run through its cultural life – the annual Abu Dhabi Festival, the Berklee Abu Dhabi education centre, the Bait Al Oud music academy. Dar Al Funoon gives that activity a permanent address, and ties it to the emirate’s wider case for culture as a driver of tourism, skills and the creative economy.

The period before 2030 will itself generate work across construction, design and the technical trades, and, in time, a roster of roles – curators, conservators, museographers – that barely featured in the conversation a decade ago. Asked what he hoped audiences would take from the building, Al Mubarak kept it to two words: “Welcome home.”