The organizers of the first Dubai Design Week chose as its opening night speaker an architect who has never built in Dubai, despite having proposed several projects there. Bernard Khoury, a graduate of Harvard and RISD best known for nightclubs and apartment buildings in his native Lebanon, told the audience of architects and journalists in Dubai that the point of his unrealized projects for Dubai was to give the city-state something it hasn’t had before: “good spaces.” 

In fact, the space Khoury spoke in was pretty good — the atrium of one of 11 new low-rise buildings that together form the first phase of the Dubai Design District (nicknamed D3). The buildings, on the edge of the city’s downtown, could be in any office park in the world, except that the architects deployed a series of chevron-shaped metal screens against the curtain wall, creating patterns that at different points suggest sand dunes or Arabic calligraphy.