Yas Marina and Hotel

Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Asymptote's design of the Yas Island Marina Hotel architecture reconciles the dramatic site conditions with the ambitious program to contain a luxury 500-room hotel with extensive amenities situated above a Formula 1 racetrack and within a Yacht Marina.
Design Concept
The architecture is composed of two 300 m long elliptical blocks each ten story high, one being a land based structure while the other is located in the Marina inlet waters. A large free-span, fuselage like steel bridge spanning the F-1 racetrack below connects both hotel towers, affording unprecedented views onto the
race and environs.
Yas Marina and Hotel in F1 Video Broadcast
Innovative Facade Skin
The entire complex is covered in a monumental steel and glass lattice grid shell structure that produces the Hotel's now famous iconic image. While the grid shell structure gives the building its image and form, it also serves an environmental purpose for the building by assisting in the stack effect of exiting heated air up and over the facades of the building, something especially important in the hot arid Abu Dhabi climate. This complex geometric skin reflects the sky and surroundings by day, and by night is fully lit by way of a state of the art programmable LED lighting system.
Facade Light System
One of the main feature of the hotels design is an over 200 meter expanse of sweeping, curvilinear glass and steel facade. The glass panels have a carefully-selected coating and frit pattern that balances visual transparency with light-responsive properties according to different local conditions. They are each individually lit with a bespoke RGBW LED luminaire designed to give asymmetrical light distribution. The LED lighting system illuminates all 5,389 glass elements individually, with an integrated control system that updates color and brightness of each glass panel 20 times per second.
Interiors