A desert rose

Designed by Atelier Jean Nouvel, the fascinating new building has an area of 52,000 square meters. Besides absorbing the historic palace in a seamless way, it features site-specific works commissioned to national and international artists, and displays works of art, archaeological relics, rare artifacts, precious objects, documents and historical photographs, offering opportunities for interactive learning. The architect's fragmented architectural design echoes the geography of Qatar while evoking the history and culture of the nation.

"Qatar has a deep rapport with the desert, with its flora and fauna, its nomadic people, its long traditions. To fuse these contrasting stories, I needed a symbolic element. Eventually, I remembered the phenomenon of the desert rose: crystalline forms, like miniature architectural events, that emerge from the ground through the work of wind, salt water, and sand," Nouvel said. “The museum that developed from this idea, with its great curved discs, intersections, and cantilevered angles, is a totality, at once architectural, spatial, and sensory,“ he continued.

The National Museum of Qatar is organized in three ‘chapters’ — Beginnings, Life in Qatar and Building the Nation — presented in eleven galleries. The visitor’s chronological journey, which extends through more than 1.5 km of experiences, starts in the geological period long before the peninsula was inhabited by humans and continues to the present day.