Architecture Review
Celebrating the Delicate Beauty of the Desert Landscape

Published: March 22, 2010

Few architects have invested more time trying to bridge the gap between the high-tech aesthetics of the West and the traditions of the Middle East than Jean Nouvel.


Jean Nouvel
A computer rendering of Jean Nouvel's design for the National Museum of Qatar. The tilting plates that form the walls will create peekaboo views from one gallery to another, pulling you along.

Artefactory/Ateliers Jean Nouvel
A rendering of the design for the National Museum of Qatar reflects a connection to the fading world of the Bedouins.


Artefactory/Ateliers Jean Nouvel
The building's disclike forms are inspired by sand roses.

His design for the Arab World Institute in Paris in 1987 was dominated by mechanical, light-regulating apertures arranged in a pattern that evoked Islamic motifs. A planned branch of the Louvre Museum in Abu Dhabi will be shaded by a gigantic dome that turns its grounds into a kind of oasis. And workers are putting the final touches on an office tower in Doha, Qatar, that is sheathed in aluminum latticework and capped by a filigreed, mosquelike dome.

But Mr. Nouvel’s design for the National Museum of Qatar, scheduled to be unveiled on Tuesday at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, may be that French architect’s most overtly poetic act of cultural synthesis yet. One of a number of major museum projects in Doha, including I. M. Pei’s year-old Museum of Islamic Art, it is part of a government push to encourage the exchange of cultural traffic — between East and West, tradition and modernity — after many years in which it seemed to move only one way. Every level of Mr. Nouvel’s project, from its materials to its dominant forms to its sprawling layout, reflects a richly imaginative effort to retain a connection to the fading world of the Bedouins from which modern Qatar sprang, while also embracing the realities of a rapidly urbanizing society.

As recently as the 1950s Doha was a small town built on fishing and pearl diving; its souk served as a trading center for Bedouin tribes.

That began to change with the rise of an economy built on oil, and the urban growth that resulted. By the 1990s high rises and air-conditioned malls were replacing traditional stucco houses. The process accelerated during the global economic boom, creating an entirely new skyline, and has continued apace since, as the government pushes ahead with construction projects like the new museums and vast Western-style university campuses. Meanwhile, as younger Qataris, many of them educated in the West, began to embrace urban culture, an older generation that grew up in the desert began to die off, taking their memories with them.

As the national museum’s director, Peggy Loar, an American who was formerly the director of the Wolfsonian Museum in Miami, put it: “The problem is that Bedouin culture is very intangible,” with artifacts that are few and fragile: “tents, hand painting, the delicate stitch on a textile.”

The Bedouins were “really about telling stories,” she continued. “So even as you see this amazing second renaissance in the Arab world, they are losing the basic underpinnings of who they are. Younger people go out into the desert in their SUVs, but they don’t live there anymore. They are losing a connection to their culture.”

Mr. Nouvel’s design begins by making a fundamental connection along these lines.

Inspired by sand roses, the tiny formations that crystallize just below the desert’s surface, the building’s dozens of disclike forms, intersecting at odd angles and piling up unevenly atop one another, celebrate a delicate beauty in the desert landscape that is invisible to those who have not spent time there. The lightness with which these forms rest on the land, meanwhile, conjures the ethereality of desert life.

Under these disclike roofs, the building is a chain of interconnected pavilions and outdoor terraces surrounding a large open-air courtyard, a layout that evokes caravanserais, shelters that were built along the old trade routes. The Amiri Palace, a traditional mud-brick structure built for the royal family in the 1920s, breaks in among the pavilions near the museum’s main entry, where it serves as a visual anchor.

Seen from above in a model, the tumbling abstract disc forms recall the explorer Wilfred Thesiger’s description of the “apparently haphazard confusion” of the desert dunes. The discs’ pinkish-beige concrete surfaces echo the hidden patterns that give the desert sands their richness — the subtle blend of colors, of heavy and light grains.

But the more you stare at the renderings, the more the project becomes recognizable as a building shaped by a forward-looking sensibility. The asymmetrical arrangement of the discs — whose razor-thin edges emphasize the building’s lightness — speaks to contemporary architectural ideas about heterogeneity and openness.

The galleries will be loosely arranged in chronological order, beginning with exhibitions on the natural history of the desert and the Persian Gulf, artifacts from Bedouin culture, historical exhibitions on the tribal wars and the establishment of the Qatari state, and finally the discovery of oil to the present. The tilting plates that form the walls in some places will create peekaboo views from one gallery to another, pulling you along. But the arrangement will also allow the audience to drift in and out of the gallery pavilions, treating them as a single sequence or as individual chapters in a looser narrative.

Mr. Nouvel imagines a minimal number of fixed displays — tents, textiles, fishing boats — set at the center of the rooms, as in a more traditional museum. The walls of the larger galleries would be covered in large-scale moving images meant to immerse visitors in the world of the desert. As he put it recently, “To understand the desert today you need helicopters and four-wheel-drive Jeeps. I think we could replicate that experience here, so the museum becomes a kind of portal to the desert.”

The design’s freshness is thrown into relief by its relationship to Mr. Pei’s distinguished Museum of Islamic Art. That building’s heavy stone geometric forms were intended as an expression of an ideal balance between traditional Islamic architecture and an equally traditional modernism. They speak of permanence. Mr. Nouvel’s creation gives weight to an underappreciated history while remaining firmly pointed toward the future. It shows an awareness of the speed with which contemporary cultures change.

Together, the two museums form the beginnings of a conversation about cultural identity that should resonate on both sides of the divide.