I remember this part of Dubai differently. In my childhood memory, Al Quoz was somewhere between warehouses, industrial edges and open stretches of heat. Today, the same landscape has become something else. In front of me was a former warehouse that had been reimagined without completely losing where it came from.

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Concrete is, in many ways, two buildings in one.

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One side feels heavy and monolithic. The existing façade is covered with a sprayed concrete finish containing glass and mirror aggregates, giving the surface a roughness that changes with the movement of light. The other side opens itself up. Translucent polycarbonate and large operable doors create a much lighter, almost dissolving edge toward The Yard.

Standing outside, I became interested in this contrast.

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I was not able to experience the interior of the building, so I began looking at what the exterior could tell me. The building seemed to move between being solid and disappearing, between absorbing light and reflecting it back.

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I photographed it in the morning, between 8 and 10 AM, under the strong summer sun. The light was intense, but it did not simply illuminate the building. It began to reveal it.

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On the rough concrete surface, the light moved across the texture, catching the small reflections embedded within it. On the translucent façade, it behaved differently. The surface began to lose its sense of weight, becoming almost transparent against the brightness of the sky.

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I found myself looking less at Concrete as a complete architectural object and more at these moments, the roughness of a surface, a reflection caught within it, a façade becoming lighter, a solid edge beginning to dissolve.

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Perhaps that is what stayed with me most.

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A warehouse, something I vaguely remembered from the UAE of my childhood, had not been erased. It had been transformed. Its industrial character was still there, but it had become part of a new cultural landscape.

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For me, photographing Concrete became less about recording the building and more about trying to understand what happens when architecture meets the particular intensity of this place—the sun, the heat, the material, and the landscape around it.