Concrete at Alserkal Avenue

About this place

Concrete is OMA's inaugural built project in the United Arab Emirates, completed in 2017 within Alserkal Avenue — Dubai's arts and cultural district carved out of the Al Quoz industrial quarter. Designed with Iyad Alsaka as lead architect, the 600-square-metre venue was conceived as a deliberately flexible instrument: double-height volumes, a moveable wall system, and a translucent polycarbonate façade that dissolves the boundary between interior and exterior when opened. The architecture reads as an honest response to its industrial context — concrete structure, raw surfaces, large garage-door apertures — while the translucent skin introduces diffused light that transforms the warehouse typology into something more considered. When open, the space becomes continuous with the street and the broader Alserkal compound; when closed, it operates as a self-contained gallery with controlled conditions for exhibition. Programmatically, Concrete functions as a non-profit art space focused on contemporary exhibitions, often foregrounding work from the Arab world and South Asia — regions historically underrepresented in the global gallery circuit. It opened in March 2017 with Syria: Into the Light, organised by the Atassi Foundation. As architecture, Concrete is modest in scale but precise in spatial logic. It demonstrates that OMA's thinking — rooted in programme, flexibility, and typological interrogation — translates cleanly to a small institutional brief. Worth visiting as part of a broader walk through Alserkal Avenue, which has developed into the most concentrated arts cluster in the Gulf over the past decade.