By the time we finished the final interview at our pop-up Monocle Radio booth at the Abu Dhabi Infrastructure Summit and recorded a special edition of The Urbanist (you can listen in here), it was still only 16.30. So, displaying a distinct lack of team spirit, I left my colleagues Carlota and Steph to pack up all the kit – what a gentleman – and ordered a Careem to take me to the Abrahamic Family House.

You might have visited, many have, including president Trump when he came to town, but I hadn’t and had yearned to ever since it opened in 2023. And I am so happy that I did. Whether it was induced by the enveloping heat or the sky beginning to blush evening pink, or perhaps the gossiping minor birds playing in the white-blossomed frangipani trees, the Abrahamic Family House proved to be a moment of staggering, overwhelming, soaring-to-the-heavens beauty.

Designed by Ghanaian-British architect David Adjaye, the site contains a mosque oriented towards Mecca, a church that faces east to the rising sun and a synagogue that looks towards Jerusalem. No one place of worship dominates, they are all made from the same materials and share, of course, a design language. They are also surrounded by a raised-platform garden that – when it’s not 35C – acts as a realm where all faiths can congregate.

You navigate between the buildings via a cool central hallway. I began in the church where a vast starburst made from thousands of wood pieces shoots from the epic heights of the ceiling. A security guard on his break came in and found a place among the pews to kneel and pray, occasionally looking up at the ceiling, to God. In the synagogue, entered via a simple, perfect corridor, two Jewish men sat talking. But the mosque was perhaps most breathtaking because the dipping sun was at that very moment filtering through the mashrabiya screen and creating heavenly beams of light. A lone worshipper stood in one corner, his face patterned with lace-like shadows.

But what was also moving were the tiny and often incidental signs of generosity and kindness at play. A feral tabby cat was curled up asleep in the air-conditioned lobby. I bent down to take its picture and a security guard caught my eye and smiled – clearly, he’d taken the executive decision to allow an animal respite from the heat. In an internal garden, hanging from one of those frangipani trees, a bird feeder. There were pools of water where doves were quenching desert thirsts. Even the gift shop was a moment of gentle perfection.

The UAE commissioned the Abrahamic Family House – named after Abraham, who plays a key role in all three of these religions – to bring people of different faiths together, to focus on a shared humanity. To celebrate diversity and peaceful coexistence. Good on them. That’s also what made the Abrahamic Family House feel so enlightened, so special, because across the Persian Gulf rockets were screeching through the evening’s delicate skies, destined to kill and destroy.

But aside from faith and spirituality, the Abrahamic Family House is also testament to the power of architecture to move us, change us. While we were at the summit, I got talking to an architect who said that one of his professors had told him that his work would carry the potential to make people fall in love – or divorce (he joked that he might have been responsible for more of the latter). And it does have that power.

This is also why a summit about infrastructure turned out to be so interesting, because Abu Dhabi is trying to use architecture to create communities, to make the emirate not just liveable but loveable. They see and understand its potential to improve people’s health, its ability to help people live full lives in the face of physical challenges and to deliver the sublime.

PS. Team Monocle regrouped at Louvre Abu Dhabi, then headed to the 421 Arts Campus and ended up having pizza at Marmellata. So, I think my ungentlemanly behaviour was forgiven. Almost.