THE Qatar Museums Authority (QMA) has revealed its plans for a new national museum, marking the next stage of its masterplan to develop Qatar into a cultural and communications hub of the Gulf and the world.

Expressed in a striking design by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Jean Nouvel, the National Museum of Qatar has been conceived and designed as a thoroughly new institution, though built around an historic structure, the Fariq Al Salatah Palace.
Jean Nouvel’s design manifests both the active, dynamic aspect of the museum’s programme and its crystallisation of the Qatari identity, in a building that, like a desert rose, appears to grow out of the ground and be one with it.
Prominently located on a 1.5-million-sq-ft site at the south end of Doha’s Corniche,  the building takes the form of a ring of low-lying, interlocking pavilions, which encircle a large courtyard area and encompass 430,000 sq ft of indoor space. In its organisation, the building suggests the image of a caravanserai – the traditional enclosed resting place that supported the flow of commerce, information and people across desert trade routes — and so gives concrete expression to the identity of a nation in movement.
The tilting, interpenetrating disks that define the pavilions’ floors, walls and roofs, clad on the exterior in sand-coloured concrete, suggest the bladelike petals of the desert rose, a mineral formation of crystallised sand found in the briny layer just beneath the desert’s surface. The disks are made of steel truss structures assembled in a hub-and-spoke arrangement and are clad in glassfibre reinforced concrete (GRC) 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. 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, will be locally sourced and/or fabricated.
The museum will be surrounded by a 1.2-million-sq ft landscaped park that interprets a Qatari desertland featuring sparse native vegetation with low water consumption. Through these and other sustainability measures, the museum is working to achieve a USGBC Leed Silver rating. Landscaping features sand dunes and stepped garden architecture to create sitting areas and spaces for the museum’s programmes of tours and garden lectures.
The museum will provide 86,000 sq ft of permanent gallery space, 21,500 sq ft of temporary gallery space, a 220-seat auditorium, a 70-seat food forum/TV studio, two cafés, a restaurant and a museum shop. Separate facilities have been provided for school groups and special guests.