Two pictures of a Toyota building in Dubai from 1985 and 2016 show the incredible development of the city in such a short space of time

Two pictures taken around the same Dubai landmark, the Toyota building, decades apart show just how dramatically the city has changed.

The Toyota Building once stood beside little more than open sand, while the same area later became surrounded by highways, skyscrapers and Dubai’s rapidly expanding skyline.

Looking beyond the building itself, old photographs of the city’s harbor, traditional wind towers and early skyscrapers reveal just how much development took place in a remarkably short period.

And one of those early skyscrapers, the Dubai World Trade Centre, helps show just how ambitious Dubai’s transformation was from the very beginning.

The Toyota Building went from desert landmark to city icon

Dubai is a city of luxury, but it wasn’t always.

The iconic Dubai Toyota building, officially known as the Nasser Rashid Lootah Building, was completed in 1974 and originally stood beside what was known as Defence Roundabout.

At the time, there were very few buildings around it, meaning the 15-story tower was an easy landmark.

The famous Toyota sign was added to the roof in 1981, eventually giving the building the nickname that has stuck ever since.

The older picture from around 1985 shows just how different the surrounding landscape looked.

There is plenty of open land around the tower, while the later photograph from 2016 shows the building surrounded by an enormous network of roads and modern development.

What was once a relatively simple roundabout had become part of one of Dubai’s busiest road networks, with Sheikh Zayed Road cutting through an area that had been largely undeveloped only a few decades earlier.

The Dubai World Trade Centre was once standing almost alone

The Toyota Building wasn’t the only landmark that looked completely different when it first appeared.

The Dubai World Trade Centre was completed in 1979 after construction began in 1974, with the 39-story tower designed by British architect John Harris.

It was originally known as Sheikh Rashid Tower and was inaugurated by Queen Elizabeth II on February 26, 1979.

At 149 meters tall, it was the tallest building in the region when it opened and quickly became a symbol of Dubai’s growing ambitions as an international business hub.

What’s particularly wild is how isolated it looked when it was first built.

The site was considered far outside the main part of Dubai at the time, sitting beside the road towards Abu Dhabi with plenty of empty desert surrounding it

The idea was that the Trade Centre would help encourage development around it – and that is pretty much exactly what happened.

Today, the tower is surrounded by a huge business district and exhibition complex, making those early photographs difficult to reconcile with the Dubai people recognize now.

From harbor construction to a skyline full of skyscrapers

Dubai’s transformation can be traced back even further than the Toyota Building and World Trade Centre.

A photograph from 1960 shows construction work taking place on Dubai Harbour, including dredging equipment and new harbor structures.

It offers a glimpse of the city at a time when major infrastructure projects were still helping to establish the foundations for its future growth.

Dubai Creek and the surrounding low-rise buildings dominate the landscape, with huge areas of undeveloped land separating different parts of the city.

However, now, the harbor is a bustling hub of luxury and skyscrapers looks like it could have just been built yesterday

And then there are the traditional wind towers.

Photographs from around 1964 and 1965 show Dubai’s older architecture, with wind towers rising above the low-rise buildings.

These structures were designed to help circulate air through homes in the hot climate, long before the city became synonymous with air-conditioned skyscrapers.

Put all those images together, and the scale of the incredible city’s transformation becomes pretty incredible.

The harbor works show a city building its infrastructure, the wind towers show what traditional Dubai looked like, and the World Trade Centre and Toyota Building represent the beginning of the high-rise era.

Just a few decades later, those same kinds of towers were being dwarfed by a forest of skyscrapers – including the Burj Khalifa, which now dominates the skyline.

And that’s what makes the two Toyota Building photographs so fascinating: the building itself barely changed, but almost everything around it did, funny isn’t it?