Following over a decade of planning, the National Museum of Qatar finally opened its doors to the public today. Designed by Ateliers Jean Nouvel, the 560,000 square-foot museum was built with a complex structure of interlocking curved discs and cantilevered angles, which was inspired by the rose-like, crystallized formations from the desert. The building's sand-colored concrete reflects its desert environment so that it appears to emerge from the ground.
A central court called the Baraha sits within the museum's ring of galleries and will serve as an outdoor gathering space for cultural events. Inside, this structure of interlocking disks continues and creates a variety of irregularly shaped volumes.
A 1.5-kilometer gallery path takes visitors through the museum's series of galleries that contain immersive, multi-sensory environments that tell the history of Qatar — from architectural spaces, music and poetry, oral histories, films, archaeological objects, site-specific artwork, and more. Presented in three parts in 11 galleries, visitors will learn about Qatar's geological beginnings long before the peninsula was inhabited all the way to the present day.
The gallery path culminates at the heart of the building with the restored Palace of Sheikh Abdullah bin Jassim Al Thani, the son of the founder of modern Qatar. Built in 1906, the historic palace was once the home of Qatar's Royal Family and seat of government, and it also served as the original National Museum.
“To imagine a desert rose as a basis for design was a very advanced idea, even a utopian one,” Jean Nouvel describes. “To construct a building with great curved disks, intersections, and cantilevered angles—the kind of shapes made by a desert rose—we had to meet enormous technical challenges. This building is at the cutting edge of technology, like Qatar itself. As a result, it is a total object: an experience that is at once architectural, spatial, and sensory, with spaces inside that exist nowhere else.”
10 Comments
It would be nice to see the construction details for those "petals" , what's the cladding?
Thanks! I wanted to see this part: "fixed on a secondary metal frame that is supported by needle beams on the main metal frame".
Thanks for the details dwgs
Here again the museum exterior competes with the artwork it houses;
it succeeds as contemporary sculpture
"To imagine a desert rose as a basis for design was a very advanced idea"
Calling Harry Frankfurt ...
Nouvel must be pretty flexible for an older man, because he sure likes to fellate himself, doesn't he?
Desert Rose? Really??
It looks like the dinner plates on the floor of my kitchen after 1994 Northridge earthquake.
I love the photo of the two photographers. That and the milling crowd of what one assumes is opening day press, really illustrates something of the buzz PR machine that is a contemporary culture-mart by big name starchitect. Great catch by Baan!
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