The Four Seasons Hotel—a collaborative effort with PLP Architects—is a landmark luxury hotel and residential mixed-use project on Al Maryah Island—the core of Abu Dhabi’s new Central Business District (CBD). The building’s external form is shaped by its internal planning, and is organized by two wings flanking a day-lit lift core that optimizes external views and establishes a network of scaled landscape spaces. The landscape spaces create a setting for hotel and residential drop-offs, bringing architecture and landscape into a harmonious whole.

The design responds to the climate and culture of its setting, drawing on a long heritage of regional building with strategies to protect the interior from the extremes of sun and wind. Traditional elements such as shade-screens, thermal mass, and carefully integrated building, water and landscape are reinterpreted in a contemporary architecture to create a lush and sensual interior environment. Experience of Tary Arterburn while at mesa.