CNN —
When Hussain AlMoosawi arrived home, he didn’t recognize anything.
The Emirati photographer, who had spent eight years studying in Australia, returned to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in 2013. He’d missed a real estate boom of dizzying proportions: not just new buildings, but new districts.
More than that, the buildings of his childhood were disappearing, replaced by shiny new skyscrapers.
But for AlMoosawi, these international icons were not the urban fabric of his home: it was the oft-overlooked, mid-century office towers and residential blocks squeezed between new highways and overshadowed by luxury developments that felt most familiar.
It sparked a desire to “understand the urban context of the UAE,” and AlMoosawi set out to meticulously document and capture these underappreciated buildings, “and reimagine the city as if it were the ‘80s, the time when I was born.”
Initially focusing on industrial landscapes, temporary structures and air conditioning units, he began to notice symmetry in many of the buildings he was photographing, inspiring his current project: facades.
“Facades are like a face,” said AlMoosawi. “It’s something that people connect with.”
His bold, geometric images strip away context to spotlight the character and diversity of everyday buildings. Using a telephoto lens to shoot close-ups from the ground or elevated positions, AlMoosawi carefully frames out distractions and sometimes removes minor obstructions like lampposts in post-processing.
So far, the 41-year-old, who is editor-in-chief for National Geographic AlArabiya Magazine, has photographed over 600 buildings across the UAE, and next year hopes to complete his collection in Abu Dhabi, where he lives.
In the long term, he hopes to turn the “lifetime project” into an interactive archive that both preserves urban heritage and invites viewers to rediscover their own city.
“Our cities aren’t big, in terms of scale, compared to many other cities,” said AlMoosawi. “But then they have a story to tell, they have things between the lines that we don’t see, and my quest is to see these things.”
Born in 1984, AlMoosawi grew up during a period of rapid development: the UAE was formed a little over a decade earlier, and the discovery of oil in 1958 had led to significant urban expansion and an influx of foreign workers.
While many early buildings were designed by Western architects, the 1970s and ‘80s saw more Middle Eastern and South Asian architects moving to the UAE, particularly from Egypt and India, said George Katodrytis, a professor of architecture at the American University of Sharjah, who has lived in the UAE for 25 years. This multicultural history is reflected in its architectural identity, “which is different than the West and is not completely Islamic, in its patterns and formal language,” he added.
Buildings from the early days of the UAE fused modernist forms — like precast concrete facades — with climate adaptations, social customs, and Arabian and Islamic design features like arches and domes, creating a “hybrid” identity, said Katodrytis.
Katodrytis sees a distinctive style emerging in Emirati facades of the 1970s and ‘80s, with features like recessed balconies creating a “jigsaw puzzle” effect that reflects cultural preferences for privacy and heavily shaded outdoor space.
“It’s not what we expect Islamic architecture to be, from a textbook or history, but it’s more of an informal interpretation,” said Katodrytis.
Like the rest of the UAE, Abu Dhabi has continued to expand over the past few decades. Between 1975 and 2019, its urban area grew from just 54 square kilometers to 758 square kilometers, and according to government data, the city saw a 66% increase in the number of residential and non-residential units between 2011 and 2023. In recent years, “mega projects” such as Yas Island and Saadiyat Island have added new residential and business hubs to the ever-evolving city.
Construction methods, materials and styles have changed significantly in the past 30 years, but Katodrytis can see an “indirect” legacy in some of the city’s recent structures, which have some similarities to designs from the 1980s, rather than those from the 2000s: “The facades have more thickness, less glass, and it’s a little bit more three-dimensional.”
Projects like the Abrahamic Family House, an interfaith complex featuring a mosque, church, and synagogue, and Louvre Abu Dhabi, offer more subtle inflections of Arabian design, focusing more on the geometry and abstract shapes often seen in the city’s 20th-century architecture. The buildings also reflect the city’s distant past, when low-rise settlements centered around shared courtyards.
And while many buildings from the 20th century have been seen as outdated, and even demolished to make way for new construction, there’s been some changing sentiment around modern heritage.
At the 2014 Venice Biennale, the UAE’s exhibition highlighted 1970s-1980s residential architecture and its connection to the country’s cultural identity.
Since then, each Emirate has started to review its approach to urban conservation: in Abu Dhabi, 64 sites were given “unconditional protection” in 2023, including the Cultural Foundation, a 1980s building that was earmarked for demolition in 2010 before it was ultimately refurbished.
“The interesting thing is that (many of) these buildings are not necessarily big, iconic buildings. They’re middle class, even workers’ housing from the ‘60s and ‘70s. So it’s a different social, cultural value, which now has been elevated,” said Katodrytis.
In 2024, this was formalized in a national policy that focuses on identifying, documenting, and protecting modern architectural heritage in the UAE.
“In urban planning, if the value of the land supersedes the value of the building, then the building has no relevant value, and so it’s demolished to be replaced by another building,” said Katodrytis. “Now, the historic value of the building supersedes the economic value.”
Other photographers have also been documenting the Emirates’ urban history: two European expatriates, known by their Instagram handle @abudhabistreets, are showcasing a side of the city beyond well-known landmarks, in a bid to reveal the cultural fabric and the city’s ever-evolving identity; and architecture professor and photographer Apostolos Kyriazis spent two years documenting Abu Dhabi’s public spaces for a joint research project.
For AlMoosawi, buildings from the ‘70s and ‘80s are deeply nostalgic, evoking memories of his grandmother’s low-rise home in Old Dubai, now a commercial center. The project has revealed to him “a clear architectural identity” that he’s found resonates with others, too.
His next challenge is working out how to organize and categorize the buildings. Finding information on buildings, like the architect or even the construction date, can be tricky, especially for older and less well-known residences, AlMoosawi said.
“I had the idea to put it out there as an interactive archive,” he said. “What I want is people to interact with these pictures. We have many people who lived in these buildings. They might have old pictures of them. So they could add more information, add more visual data, and you never know what you might get.”
By the end of the project, he expects to have photographed around 2,000 buildings — and hopes the project will inspire people to look again at the urban landscapes close to home that many of us take for granted.
“I have many people who tell me, ‘We’ve always lived here, we’ve never seen that,’” he added.
This story has been updated to reflect how long Hussain AlMoosawi studied in Australia.
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