Over a decade in the making, the National Museum of Qatar, designed by Pritzker Prize laureate Jean Nouvel, has finally opened to the public. Built with enormous, interlocking discs and spanning over 12 acres of gross floor area, the mega-museum is an architectural landmark for Qatar’s cultural identity.

“The National Museum is dedicated to the history of Qatar,” says Nouvel, who also designed the Louvre Abu Dhabi, completed in 2017. “Symbolically, its architecture evokes the desert, its silent and eternal dimension, but also the spirit of modernity and daring that have come along and shaken up what seemed unshakeable. So it’s the contradictions in that history that I’ve sought to evoke here.”

For Nouvel, the desert rose is one of the best symbols of the desert. The flower-like crystal cluster, which occurs in arid coastal regions, is replicated on a large-scale in the museum architecture with massive, petal-like discs of varying sizes and curvatures that intersect and jut out to form the interior walls, cantilevered elements, and experimental building shape. A steel frame spanning an insulated, waterproof substructure supports the discs, clad in high-performance, glass fiber-reinforced concrete—all of it colored sandy beige to match the desert.

Inside, the museum circuit forms a nearly one-mile-long loop that takes visitors through 11 immersive galleries telling the story of Qatar from its beginnings, with fossils and pearl fishing, to the state of present-day Qatar and the natural gas industry.

The galleries wrap around a central courtyard, named the Baraha, styled after the historic spaces where travelers would come and unload their merchandise. Protected from the sun by cantilevered discs, the Baraha is designed to accommodate outdoor events, performances, and exhibitions.

The end of the circuit, which takes about two hours to complete, empties out at the restored historic Palace of Sheikh Abdullah bin Jassim Al Thani, son of the founder of modern Qatar.

“The museography that grew out of this specific history and these specific considerations provides an experience that’s architectural, spatial, and sensory all at once,” Nouvel adds. “Inside, you find spaces that don’t exist anywhere else in the world, since it’s the interlocking of all these disks that forms the building, inside and out. The result is a construction made of geometric spaces.”

Learn more about the National Museum of Qatar.

Related Reading: 10 Jean Nouvel Buildings We Love

Appears In

Jean Nouvel’s National Museum of Qatar Mimics a Desert Rose