When Landscape Middle East profiled Wedyan in its April 2026 issue, it led with a distinction worth holding onto: this is not a tower with landscape added to it. It is a building where landscape was conceived as structure from the first day of design.

Rising 46 storeys along the Dubai Canal, Wedyan is the debut project of Al Ghurair Collection. Kengo Kuma led the architecture; Gustafson Porter + Bowman brought in the landscape. The two were never developed in sequence. Every terrace, planted area and amenity was developed in parallel with the architectural vision, with over 30 specialists engaged from the earliest stage.

That early coordination is what makes the landscape function rather than decorate. The terraces extend well beyond conventional balcony depth, overhangs reaching from roughly three metres to nearly five in places, which does three things at once: shades the façade and reduces heat gain, creates genuinely usable outdoor rooms, and establishes the conditions plants need to survive at height. Each façade was then treated as its own environment, with planting calibrated to orientation and solar exposure: resilient, desert-adapted species where exposure is greatest, denser and softer planting in the shaded zones.

Beneath all of it sits the engineering that decides whether a green building stays green. Subsurface irrigation delivers water deep into the soil to encourage root growth and limit evaporation, essential in this climate, and maintenance was designed in from the outset rather than left to chance. The involvement of Laura Gatti, whose work on Milan's Bosco Verticale helped set the benchmark for vertical planting, signals the level of technical rigour behind the visual intent.

Kengo Kuma describes Wedyan as a dialogue between Japanese aesthetics and the context of Dubai, softness brought to the design through shadows that cascade across the façade, terraces and amenity spaces. The result reframes what super prime luxury means in a residential tower: not merely finishes and amenities, but how a building lives, breathes and performs over time.

Wedyan is “like a mountain, slowly stepping down into the sea.” 

This is the image Kengo Kuma imagines when he describes Wedyan: a conversation between land and water, where architecture cascades and descends to eventually become part of the landscape itself. It is also what Sultan Al Ghurair speaks about in his vision: a building should have a relationship with the environment around it. Not simply occupy a site, but belong to it. 

A dialogue with its environment 

Wedyan sits on the bend of the Dubai Water Canal near Business Bay, DIFC and Downtown Dubai. It is a rare piece of ground in the city’s centre, along a waterfront promenade. 

The Dubai Water Canal is the 3.2 km waterway that connects Business Bay to the Arabian Gulf, threading a new realm of living through the heart of the city. It is the 6.4 km of promenade that now draw residents, cyclists, runners and diners along the canal’s edge. It is the skyline of Business Bay and Downtown Dubai rising behind it, and the shorter horizon of Jumeirah and the sea beyond. 

Wedyan is shaped in response to the canal. The curves of the façade descend in layers, with each terrace changing its shape and taking new forms at every level until the lower canopies seem to meet the waters and the ground dissolves into the community. The planting, curated by Gustafson Porter + Bowman, is a vertical ecosystem rather than a cosmetic layer: desert-tolerant trees, shrubs and flowering species that trace the building from ground to sky. Even the ground floor, with its permeable colonnade and shaded walkways, invites the promenade to continue through the building rather than around it. 

Leaning toward the water. Listening to the city. A mountain slowly stepping down into the sea.  Wedyan is a building in conversation with its environment. This is what it is designed to be.