With 24,000 stainless steel pieces that must make a 6,546-kilometre journey before reassembly, this could be one of the world's biggest and most challenging jigsaw puzzles.
When assembled, the "puzzle" will stand 20 metres tall and take up an area of 3,500 square metres.
The structure is in fact the UAE Pavilion from last year's World Expo in the Chinese city of Shanghai. Last week, the Tourism Development and Investment Company (TDIC) announced they would be moving the pavilion, piece by piece, to Saadiyat Island in the capital.
The building will become the first pavilion to be dismantled and rebuilt in another country since the tradition of international expos began with London's Great Exhibition of 1851.
Gerard Evenden, the chief architect in charge of the project and a senior partner at Foster + Partners, the UK-based firm who also designed the new Zayed National Museum and the environmentally friendly Masdar city, said the feat was an "amazing challenge" and one he felt passionately about.
"From Foster + Partners' point of view it is fantastic that the UAE decided to bring their pavilion back home. The whole ethos of the World Expo was one of sustainable urban development and this sends a wonderful message to the rest of the world."
It was an important project to be involved in from the start, Mr Evenden said.
"We get a lot of big jobs all over the world, but this one was special," he said. "To design the UAE Pavilion for the Expo in China was like taking the country to another. We had to represent the UAE on a world stage - it was very important to get it right."
The UAE and Saudi Arabia were the only two Middle Eastern countries to have pavilions at the Expo, which opened on May 1 last year.
The UAE Pavilion was designed to represent the rounded shape of desert sand dunes.
In order to mimic the way the desert is shaped by wind, the building was rippled on the windward side and smooth on its sheltered side. It was also designed to appear red, copper and gold in the day and glow with golden internal lighting at night.
At an early stage in the design of the building officials alerted the architects that they were planning to move the building back home after the Expo.
As with all temporary buildings, Mr Evenden confirmed it was initially designed with a view to dismantling it.
"What's good about the building from an architectural point of view is that it is demountable," he said. "Although it is a complicated building, we always knew it was going to have to come down. The relocation and reconstruction process was natural progression from there."
The dismantling of the structure began last month and, according to Sheikha Mahra al Qassimi, the senior communications manager for Abu Dhabi projects at TDIC, the entire structure will be disassembled and ready for transfer to the UAE in 60 shipping containers by April.
Under strict instruction from Foster + Partners, the Chinese contractors charged with the process will label each component with a code so that when it arrives in the capital each piece can be slotted into place.
By the end of the year, they expect it to be open to the public and fully functional as a multipurpose exhibition centre.
"The arrival of the UAE Pavilion exhibition space marks the next step in [Saadiyat] Island's journey to become a hub for cultural, architectural and educational excellence," Mubarak al Muhairi, the managing director at TDIC, said.
Mr Evenden said his team were in the process of preparing the site on Saadiyat Island. "At the moment we are working with TDIC and the master planners to look at where exactly it will be located. We need to check the topography and the levels to find the best place for it to sit."
He added that some mechanical and electronic modifications would be made to the building in order to suit the harsh desert climate, including an enhancement of the air-conditioning system, but otherwise the project was fairly straightforward.
"It is like a very big jigsaw puzzle," said Mr Evenden. "But, of course, it is very geometrically complex. It will be a great achievement once we have completed it."
