The museum is part of a larger complex of arts and cultural institutions on Saadiyat Island intended to appeal to international tourists.

[4] The Guggenheim building is part of a massive project to "create an exhibition space intended to turn this once-sleepy desert city along the Persian Gulf into an international arts capital and tourist destination.

[12] Inspired by traditional middle-eastern covered courtyards and wind towers, used to cool structures exposed to the desert sun, the museum's clusters of horizontal and vertical galleries of various sizes are connected by catwalks and planned around a central, covered courtyard, incorporating natural features intended to maximize the energy efficiency of the building.

[14] In 2011, the museum began site and structural work on a peninsula at the northwestern tip of Saadiyat Island adjacent to Abu Dhabi, but construction was suspended the same year.

The museum showed a preview of these works as "Seeing Through Light: Selections from the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Collection" at the island's visitor's center at Saadiyat from November 2014 through January 2015.

[23] In 2011, over 130 international artists urged a boycott of the new Guggenheim museum (as well as Louvre Abu Dhabi), citing reports, since 2009, of abuses of foreign construction workers on Saadiyat Island, including the arbitrary withholding of wages, unsafe working conditions, and failure of companies to pay or reimburse the steep recruitment fees being charged to laborers.

[31] In 2013, The Observer reported that conditions for the workers at the Louvre and New York University construction sites on Saadiyat amounted to "modern-day slavery".

[9][32] In 2014, the Guggenheim's Director, Richard Armstrong, said that he believed that living conditions for the workers at the Louvre project were now good and that "many fewer" of them were having their passports confiscated.

[33][18] Later in 2014, the Guggenheim's architect, Gehry, commented that working with the Abu Dhabi officials to implement the law to improve the labor conditions at the museum's site is "a moral responsibility.

Labor lawyer Scott Horton told Architectural Record that he hoped the Guggenheim project will influence the treatment of workers on other Saadiyat sites and will "serve as a model for doing things right.