Last week, one piece of news managed to capture the UAE's attention within a matter of hours: the Toyota Building is officially set to be demolished by 2027. And people had feelings about it. Locals and expats seemed equally frustrated. Some dug out old photographs of the Toyota Building, others immediately started asking why, while the rest of us simply watched the story take over our feeds.

So, we decided to look at what is actually behind it. What is happening to the Toyota Building, and why? What made this fairly ordinary residential block such an important part of Dubai's visual identity? And, my favourite one: why do we become so attached to a place most of us have never even been inside — and one that can hardly be called an ancient relic?

I had just come from the Zayed National Museum when I started writing this article, which turned out to be useful timing. After looking at photographs of Abu Dhabi and Dubai when much of what is built up today was still desert, 1974 — the year the building we now know as the Toyota Building was completed — suddenly felt much further away.

Because normally, it doesn't. And that is partly what makes Dubai's timeline so difficult to wrap your head around. You live among skyscrapers, six-lane highways, some of the world's biggest companies and airlines, and it becomes very easy to forget how recently much of it arrived.

So, let’s put 1974 into perspective.

What did the United States look like that year? It had put a man on the Moon five years earlier. The Empire State Building — one of New York City's most famous skyscrapers had already been standing for more than 40 years, and the Sears Tower had been completed the year before — at the time, the tallest building in the world.

Don't want to use the United States as the comparison? Fair enough — let's move a little closer. Take post-war Europe. France, for example. By 1974, the Paris Métro had already been running for more than 70 years. The Boulevard Périphérique, the enormous ring road around Paris, had fully opened the year before. And La Défense — which you may recognise from Emily in Paris — was already well on its way to becoming the office-tower-filled business district we know today.

Now come back to the UAE.

In 1974, the country itself was only three years old. Dubai had around 183,000 residents by 1975, compared with millions today. The Dubai World Trade Centre — which would later become one of the defining symbols of the city's early transformation — didn't exist yet. Downtown Dubai was still decades away, and construction on the Burj Khalifa wouldn't begin for another 30 years.

And this brings us back to the Toyota Building. Its surroundings at the time looked nothing like the Sheikh Zayed Road we know today. New roads cut through vast stretches of open land, with individual buildings appearing almost in isolation against the desert. When the Toyota Building was completed in 1974, it became one of the early landmarks of a city beginning to expand beyond the older neighbourhoods around the Creek.

Before we go any further, one small clarification: the Toyota Building isn’t actually called the Toyota Building.

I know. With a nickname like that, you would naturally assume there is a whole Toyota story behind it. Perhaps this was the company’s first Dubai office, or Toyota invested in the building as the city began to grow. Maybe they even built the thing. It would certainly make sense.

Well, no. Not even close. The story of how an ordinary residential building ended up carrying the name of a Japanese car company is actually much more accidental.

Its real name is the Nasser Rashid Lootah Building, a two-block, 15-storey residential complex with one, two and three-bedroom flats and commercial spaces on the ground floor, many of which are still occupied by tenants today. Over the decades, generations of Dubai residents, including many expatriate families, have called it home.

So where does Toyota come into it? Quite literally, from the roof.

In 1981, Toyota paid to install a giant advertising sign on top of the building. No office, no showroom, no secret Toyota headquarters — just an advert. But it was big, impossible to miss and, as Dubai grew around it, extremely useful as a landmark. People started giving directions using the sign and referring to the whole building simply as the Toyota Building. The nickname stuck.

And “stuck” is probably an understatement. That became particularly clear in 2018, when Toyota’s advertising contract expired and the sign came down. People genuinely missed it. For those who had spent years passing it on their commute, using it for directions or simply seeing it as part of the city, the sign was no longer just advertising. Toyota got the message and in 2022, the sign returned “by popular demand” following a public survey.

And that is probably the best explanation of why this otherwise fairly ordinary residential building matters: a rooftop advert accidentally became a landmark, and the landmark became part of Dubai’s collective memory.

If the building is so well known and has become an unofficial Dubai landmark, the obvious question is: why demolish it at all?

The answer is much less sentimental than the story of the Toyota sign.

Khaleej Times reported that the evacuation followed concerns over overcrowding and illegally partitioned flats. According to a representative of Nasser Rashid Lootah Group, some apartments had been divided into smaller rooms accommodating as many as 15 people, with authorities instructing management to clear the overcrowded units. Building management has also reportedly said that Dubai Municipality hadn't approved further maintenance work because of the property’s condition.

And this brings us back to where the story started: 1974. More than five decades later, the building is dealing with the realities that can come with age, alongside overcrowding and safety concerns. Add Dubai’s strict approach to building and fire safety, and the decision to empty the property ahead of its planned 2027 demolition becomes easier to understand.

For now, though, one part of the story remains unanswered: what will replace it? No plans for the site have yet been publicly confirmed.

We could probably finish the article here and move on to the next story. But there is one question I can't quite let go of.

I can understand why people who grew up in Dubai might be upset about the Toyota Building disappearing. They may remember it as one of the landmarks of an entirely different Dubai, or perhaps their parents do — a building that was already there before much of the city we know today appeared around it.

But what about expats?

You might have lived in Dubai for three, five, 10 or even 15 years — long enough for the city to feel like home, but not long enough to remember the Toyota Building appearing in it. By the time many of us arrived, it had already been standing there for decades, while the Burj Khalifa dominated the skyline and the Burj Al Arab had long become one of the city's symbols. Perhaps you never lived in the Toyota Building or worked there. Maybe you only passed it occasionally. There might not be one particular memory that explains why it matters to you. And still, you care. Why?

Psychology has a concept that helps explain it: place attachment. The idea is that you don't need to have grown up around a place for it to become meaningful to you. Sometimes, it simply requires repetition.

Think about the routes you take again and again, the buildings you pass without really looking at them, the places that quietly become reference points in your everyday life. These are time-space routines — individually, they might mean very little. But repeat them for months or years, and those places gradually become part of your mental map of life.

They can also become what psychologists call mnemonic cues — physical surroundings that trigger memories and associations, even when the place itself was never particularly important to begin with.

And suddenly, the Toyota Building makes a little more sense. Maybe you arrived in Dubai in 2020. It was already there. Then, for the next six years, you passed it on your way to work, met friends somewhere nearby or heard “turn after the Toyota Building” when someone was giving directions. Most of the time, you probably didn't think about the building at all.

Until someone told you it was disappearing. Because what is disappearing isn't just a building. It is a familiar piece of scenery against which part of your own life happened.

Somewhere along the way, it stopped being part of Dubai's history and became part of your personal history in Dubai.