Dubai Frame Tickets and Tours | GetExperience.com

The Dubai Frame is a rectangle. Gold-clad steel stands 150 metres tall and some 96 metres wide in Zabeel Park. Old Dubai fills one side of the opening, the new city the other.

Design and dispute

The shape won a competition in 2009. It was entered by the Mexican architect Fernando Donis, and the city built it without him. He sued in a United States federal court in 2016, and the case never reached a conclusion.

How the visit runs

It opened on the first day of 2018, and the route through it is short and unusually well ordered.

• Ground floor. A gallery on the city before the towers, from pearling village to trading port.
• The lift. Forty-eight floors in seventy-five seconds, up to the deck that bridges the two uprights.
• The view. Deira, the creek and the low districts to the north; Sheikh Zayed Road and the Burj Khalifa to the south.
• The glass. Floor panels turn from opaque to clear as you step onto them, with a solid walkway around them for anyone who would rather not.
• The way down. A projection room showing the city fifty years from now.

An hour covers all of it comfortably.

Practical

• Tickets. Around fifty dirhams for adults and twenty for children, and the same ticket covers entry to Zabeel Park.
• Capacity. The deck takes roughly two hundred people an hour, so late-afternoon slots go first.
• Best hour. Late afternoon, when the sun sits behind you for the old city and the towers light up before you leave.
• Metro. Al Jafiliya on the Red Line, then ten to fifteen minutes on foot. Fine in winter, punishing from May.
• Visibility. Summer haze flattens the view, and the clearest air follows winter rain.
• Transfers. Bought with hotel pickup, the outing runs about three hours door to door and costs several times the ticket alone.