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Home to the new ME Dubai hotel, the Opus is located in the Burj Khalifa district adjacent to Downtown Dubai and Business Bay on the Dubai Water Canal. Exploring the balance between solid and void, opaque and transparent, interior and exterior, the design was presented by Zaha Hadid in 2007 and is the only hotel in which she created both its architecture and interiors.

The structure of the Sustainability Pavilion at Dubai Expo 2020 is now complete. The Sustainability Pavilion names as Terra represents the planet Earth. The pavilion will take visitors on an immersive and emotional journey through the wonders of the natural world and teach them the way to create a better, more sustainable future.

Designed by Foster + Partners, The House of Wisdom is a newly opened iconic library and a cultural centre in the city of Sharjah, UAE.

Located next to the historic Union House on the Dubai waterfront, the Union Museum honors the 1971 signing of the document that created the United Arab Emirates and celebrates the rich culture and history of its people. Much of the museum is underground, including permanent and temporary galleries, theatres, event spaces and archival facilities. The dramatic entrance pavilion rests lightly upon a reflecting pool and plaza, its undulating parabolic curves representing the parchment upon which the unification agreement was written and its tapering golden columns representing the pens with which the document was signed.

British architectural firm Hopkins Architects has completed the Buhais Geology Park Interpretative Centre, a new research and education facility highlighting the “prehistoric and geological significance” of the former seabed known as al-Madam Plain, located southeast of the UAE city of Sharjah.

The Museum of the Future is a visionary cultural institution currently under construction in Dubai, UAE. 

The Al Badiyah Mosque is the oldest extant mosque in the United Arab Emirates. It is located in a small village in emirate Fujairah about 50 km north from region center. It is also known as Ottoman Mosque.

Yas Viceroy Abu Dhabi Hotel, The United Arab Emirates

By: CAP Chalabi Architekten & Partner

Wahat Al Karama, a 46,000 square meter site located directly opposite from the world-famous Shekih Zayed Grand Mosque in the capital, is a home to a permanent memorial to the United Arab Emirates' heroes - soldiers, police, diplomats and civilians - who sacrificed their lives in the service of their country since the time of its founding in 1971.

Behind the design of the Memorial is British artist Idris Khan. Born in the UK, Idris has already received international acclaim for his minimal yet emotionally charged photographs, videos and sculptures.

The Al- Khalefeyah Library project is situated in the old city centre of Muharraq and is the reconstruction of the original Khalefeyah Library, which was one of the first public libraries to be built in Bahrain. The library will be rebuilt on its original location and is designed by the Dutch firm SeARCH bv in collaboration with the Bahrain- based architects PAD. Since, the original footprint of the library is currently half-occupied by a road extension, the building has been designed on half the existing footprint and stretches vertically over the three levels that cantilever to recall the original footprint of the building. The building will accommodate a reading area, a research center, an inet lab as well as offices and will be open to the public, and provide a public and cultural program targeted at the youth in the heart of Muharraq. (http://culture.gov.bh/en/authority/projects/Al-KhalefeyahLibrary/)

The Louvre Abu Dhabi is an art and civilization museum, located in Abu Dhabi, UAE. The museum was established on 8 November 2017. It is part of a thirty-year agreement between the city of Abu Dhabi and the French government. The museum is located on the Saadiyat Island Cultural District. 

The Museum of Islamic Art, Doha, Qatar

Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque is located in Abu Dhabi, the capital city of the United Arab Emirates. The largest mosque in the country, it is the key place of worship for Friday gathering and Eid prayers. During Eid it may be visited by more than 41,000 people. The Grand Mosque was constructed between 1996 and 2007.

London design studio Blacksheep has completed an immersive cookery environment in Seoul's Yeongdeungpo neighbourhood that includes a deli, cafe, library and kitchen featuring industrial materials and high-end European furniture. Read more View the full article

Fashion designer and Kanye West's creative director Virgil Abloh is the latest name to team up with IKEA. In this interview, he speaks about his cult clothing brand, the connection between streetwear and modernist architecture, and the influence of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe on his work. Read more View the full article

In this post I would like to share with you the process of creation of the Bahrain World Trade Centre I have taken with my Sigma DP1x camera in autumn 2011. I am in no means a professional photographer and the below recipe is just to introduce some methods which I have come across and which you may find useful, I will be very much looking forward to your comments and ideas! The iconic Bahrain World Trade Centre twin towers are located on the northern bank of Manama overlooking the Persian Gulf sea as the main dominant of the Manama skyline. In one ow my walks I have taken this photograph with my compact Sigma DP1x digital camera. I had no tripod at the time and was rather experimenting with finding different interesting views for photographing the skyline. The photograph was taken at around 5:30pm before the sun set which is the only time when the sun can reflect on the facade of the towers to further render interesting texture of the sea waves. For its unique chip structure (no Bayer mask) the camera has I use it every time i need to achieve the sharpest possible image and line rendition. Tho photograph was shot in RAW format which enables later loss-less fine tuning of the exposition values, color balance and other attribute of the photograph. 1. Processing in SIGMA Photo Pro 5 The SIGMA Photo Pro 5 is the native post processing application provided by SIGMA for fine tuning the RAW and JPEG files captured by SIGMA cameras. When opened in the application the photograph looked like shown on the left image. While it appeared to have the correct exposure, my intention for the further use was to have it a bit lighter, and so here we have the second photograph for which I have increased the exposure value by +0.9 EV. While I had found the composition and the texture of the photograph quite interesting I wanted to reduce the colour information as it wasn't in my opinion contributing to the overall atmosphere. I had the feeling the colour information is forcing us to stay in this reality preventing us to start dreaming about the sea and the sky and the mankind's desires to reach it. Be converting the photograph to a monochrome scale I was expecting it to start talking to us solely by the means of the its composition and the game of lights and shadows and its texture. While the middle photograph indicates the result after converting the color scale to a monochrome scale, I have also created 2 additional black-and-white versions of which one was underexposed by 1 EV (on the left) and one was overexposed by 1 EV (on the right). This was necessary for further processing in the HDR software I was intended to use in the next step. Just a reminder - unlike with JPEGs the change of the exposition values in RAW format enables us to control the exposition without losing the pixel information. Further, working with RAW format enables us to create the EV bracketing from a single file, benefit of which is no need of use of a tripod at the time of taking a photograph. Another benefit is the elimination of loss of sharpness when aligning the resulting photographs for HDR processing. 3. Rendering in Photomatix Pro 4.0 Photomatix is an HDR application which enables additional postprocessing of photographs. It controls not only many important parameters of the photographs, it also provides a control over composing HDR photographs as well as additional rendering of their details. For the purpose of this photographs I wished to render some interesting texture to the sea surface and use the HDR function to brighten the high contrast photograph and to give it some additional surreal character. I have imported the above 3 BW photographs into the application in a batch, asking the software to combine them using the Tone Mapping method, specifically the BW Enhancer preset. I have further adjusted the White Point, Black Point and Gamma to achieve the brightness and contrast matching my taste. When satisfied I let the software render the whole result in high resolution TIFF which looked like this (resized). 4. ACDSee to add the GPS information While I was almost satisfied with the result I needed to add the GPS information into its TIFF's EXIF header so that it could be used later by various online applications, such as our Ideon Gallery which are capable of displaying the location the photo was taken from on a map. To achieve this I opened the file in the ACDSee Pro 5 application which enables addition of the GPS information with extreme ease by simple dragging and dropping the files to a map. I prefer using this post processing method to enabling the in-built camera GPS function as it prevents significant draining of the camera's batteries. 5. Photoshop CS6 for layers The last thing I needed to add to the photograph was the Caption and the Copyright layers, which would not only provide a title to the photograph but, once circulated, it would also enable users to be navigated back to its source of origin at Ideon.cz. In Photoshop I added several layers with the text and the logo and I positioned them symmetrically at the bottom of the page so as to support the existing composition. In Photoshop (although this was done at the very beginning of the process). I have also rectified the geometry of the photograph so that the verticals were really vertical, the photograph was also cropped with precision so that the WTC towers were aligned with the absolute vertical axis of the format. Before flattening the layers I have also added fine sharpening touch to the photograph. 6. The resulting photo