Doha: Assigned by His Majesty Sultan Qaboos, His Highness Sayyid Haitham bin Tareq al Said attended the opening ceremony of the new building of Qatar National Museum on Wednesday. The new museum is housed within a spectacular 40,000 square-metre building designed by French architect Jean Nouvel to look like a ‘‘desert rose” — a cluster of crystals that forms in dry, sandy areas. “It creates a variation of space and unexpected spaces and unexpected proportions. I think the visitor will be surprised,” Nouvel said at an event on Wednesday to mark the opening.
“Qatar is an ancient land, rich in the traditions of the desert and the sea, but also a land that hosted many past civilisations,” Shaikha al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa al Thani, chairperson of Qatar Museums, said at the opening ceremony. The museum, which opens to the public on Thursday, is one of a number of high-profile buildings designed to make the capital more attractive to foreign visitors. It joins the Museum of Islamic Art and the Arab Museum of Modern Art. With displays starting in the geological period long before the peninsula was inhabited by humans and continuing to the present day, the museum takes the visitor in a chronological journey.
Surrounded by a park, the new cultural showcase features the renowned 19-century Pearl Carpet of Baroda, which is embroidered with more than 1.5 million of pearls, and adorned with emeralds, diamonds, and sapphires. It also houses manuscripts, documents, photographs, jewellery, and costumes. Qatari officials declined to disclose the cost of building the museum, which includes 52,000 square metres of winding floor space, an artificial lagoon, and the restored palace of Shaikh Abdullah bin Jassim al Thani, who ruled until 1949. Set along the Doha seaside and over a decade in the making, the museum’s exterior is a tangle of massive interlocking discs that evoke the shape of a desert rose, a design Nouvel said was a big technical challenge.
The interior features walls splashed with looping videos on Qatar’s desert life and pearl diving in past eras, plus digital archives about life under Ottoman and British rule. Shaikha al Mayassa al Thani said; “All people are welcome to this museum and we remain open to the rest of the world and we remain open to dialogue.” Nouvel also designed United Arab Emirates’ Louvre Abu Dhabi, which opened in 2017 with more than 600 art works from around the world as part of that country’s own efforts to burnish its regional culture credentials. — Agencies
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