Qatar National Museum in Doha by Jean Nouvel, near completed

Jean Nouvel's interlocking disc-formed Qatar National Museum growing organically is near completed, at Al Corniche Street in Doha, Qatar.

Overview. Qatar National Museum in Doha by Jean Nouvel. Photograph by Iwan Baan

The National Museum of Qatar is another eagerly anticipated project of Jean Nouvel after the Louvre Abu Dhabi Museum in Abu Dhabi, UAE, which officially set to open to the public last November 11, 2017.

Commissioned by Qatar Museums Authority (QMA), Jean Nouvel's design is inspired by the capricious shapes of the crystals of the so-called desert rose and situated around the original Emiri palace. The museum uses its expressiveness to establish a link between the Bedouin culture and global modernity. When completed, the Museum will celebrate the culture and heritage of Qatar and its people, embodying the pride and traditions of Qataris

The building, is a structural innovation bet encompassing a total of 53,000 sqm usable floor area, will include the 8,000 sqm of permanent exhibition space, 2,000 sqm area for temporary, rotating exhibitions, 220 seat auditorium, retail outlets, two restaurants and a café, a dedicated food forum, preserving culinary traditions, research centre and laboratories.

The National Museum of Qatar building is surrounded by a park of 112,000 m² that reinterprets the desert pavement of Qatar. At the southern end of the Corniche, the seaside promenade that runs through the bay of Doha, the museum is the first monument that can be seen on arrival at the new international airport; the building thus becomes the image of welcome to Qatar.

The museum is built around Sheikh Abdullah bin Jassim Al-Thani’s original palace – his family home and seat of the government for 25 years.

"Its mission is to tie the past of the Emirate, the central place it occupies today on the international scene and its future. The scenography will put into dialogue the national collections and the films directed by prestigious authors that will bring the museum galleries to life. The museum will also offer visitors the opportunity to discover the most outstanding Qatar sites and compare this live experience with the one that will be offered by the collections and the films," said Jean Nouvel.

Jean Nouvel's firm Ateliers Jean Nouvel has been working on the project since 2010. The building was originally scheduled to open in 2015 but due to a minor fire and the installation of art pieces has delayed the opening of the museum. The museum is officially planned to open to the public in December 2018.

The disks are made of steel truss structures assembled in a hub-and-spoke arrangement and are clad in glass fiber reinforced concrete panels. Columns concealed within the vertical disks carry the loads of the horizontal disks to the ground.

Glazed facades fill the voids between disks. Perimeter mullions are recessed into the ceiling, floor and walls, giving the glazing a frameless appearance when viewed from the outside. Deep disk-shaped sun-breaker elements filter incoming sunlight.

Like the exterior, the interior is a landscape of interlocking disks. Floors are sand-colored polished concrete, while the vertical disk walls are clad in 'stuc-pierre,' a traditional gypsum- and lime-blended plaster formulated to imitate stone. Thermal buffer zones within the disk cavities will reduce cooling loads, while the deep overhangs of the disks will create cool, shady areas for outdoor promenades and protect the interior from light and heat.

Steel and concrete, the main materials of the building, are locally sourced and fabricated. The landscaping will feature sparse native vegetation with low water consumption. Through these and other sustainability measures, the Museum is working to achieve a USGBC LEED Silver rating.

The Museum’s gardens are specifically designed for the intense climate of Qatar. Plantings will include native grasses and indigenous plants, such as pomegranate trees, date palms, herbs and the Sidra tree, the national tree of Qatar. Landscaping will feature sand dunes and stepped garden architecture to create sitting areas and spaces for the Museum’s programs of tours and garden lectures.

Ateliers Jean Nouvel is working with landscape architects Michel Desvigne Paysagiste, landscape engineering Aecom, Renaud Pierard for museography, dUCKS scéno for scenography, Gehry Technology for BIM Managament on this project.

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Detail. Qatar National Museum in Doha by Jean Nouvel. Photograph by Iwan Baan

Modelo del amplio campus del museo. Imagen de Ateliers Jean Nouvel.

View from inside. Qatar National Museum in Doha by Jean Nouvel. Photograph by Iwan Baan

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JEAN NOUVEL

Jean Nouvel, (born August 12, 1945) is a French architect. Nouvel studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and was a founding member of Mars 1976 and Syndicat de l'Architecture. He has obtained a number of prestigious distinctions over the course of his career, including the Aga Khan Award for Architecture (technically, the prize was awarded for the Institut du Monde Arabe which Nouvel designed), the Wolf Prize in Arts in 2005 and the Pritzker Prize in 2008.

Nouvel was awarded the Pritzker Prize, architecture's highest honour, in 2008, for his work on more than 200 projects, among them, in the words of The New York Times, the "exotically louvered" Arab World Institute, the bullet-shaped and "candy-colored" Torre Agbar in Barcelona, the "muscular" Guthrie Theater with its cantilevered bridge in Minneapolis, and in Paris, the "defiant, mysterious and wildly eccentric" Musée du quai Branly (2006) and the Philharmonie de Paris (a "trip into the unknown" c. 2012).

Pritzker points to several more major works: in Europe, the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art (1994), the Culture and Convention Center in Lucerne (2000), the Opéra Nouvel in Lyon (1993) , Expo 2002 in Switzerland and, under construction, the Copenhagen Concert Hall and the courthouse in Nantes (2000); as well as two tall towers in planning in North America, Tour Verre in New York City and a cancelled condominium tower in Los Angeles. International cultural projects such as the Abu Dhabi Louvre, the Philharmonic Hall in Paris, the Qatar National Museum in Doha, or the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2010 in London.

In its citation, the jury of the Pritzker prize noted:

Of the many phrases that might be used to describe the career of architect Jean Nouvel, foremost are those that emphasize his courageous pursuit of new ideas and his challenge of accepted norms in order to stretch the boundaries of the field. [...] The jury acknowledged the ‘persistence, imagination, exuberance, and, above all, an insatiable urge for creative experimentation’ as qualities abundant in Nouvel’s work.

Among his principal completed projects, we find the Arab World Institute in Paris, the Cartier Foundation and the Quai Branly museum in Paris, the Culture and Congress Center KKL in Lucerne, the extension of the Queen Sofia Arts Center in Madrid, the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, the Philharmonic of Paris…

Among the projects currently under studies or under construction: the “53W53, Tour de Verre” integrating the extension of the MoMA galleries in New York, the residential towers “Le Nouvel” in Kuala Lumpur, “Anderson 18” and “Ardmore” in Singapore and “Rosewood” in São Paulo, the office towers “Hekla” and “Duo” in Paris, the cultural complex “The Artists’ Garden” in Qingdao or the National Art Museum of China NAMOC in Beijing… The design of the Louvre Abu Dhabi began in 2006 with Jean Nouvel’s Partner Architect Hala Wardé.