Jonathan Morrison
The National Museum of Qatar is the most extraordinary building of the decade
Jean Nouvel’s extraordinary, otherworldly building, modelled on a desert rose, deserves a visit in its own right
If you go digging for roots in the desert, perhaps you shouldn’t be surprised that you end up clutching a rock instead. That’s what seems to have happened in Qatar, where the straightforward objective of building a museum to tell the story of the Gulf kingdom has produced the most extraordinary building of the decade.
The rock in question is actually a “desert rose”, a cluster of gypsum crystals that forms in arid coastal regions and so can be said to be a fusion of sea and sand. A bit like — you guessed it — Qatar.
“As a vast piece of national iconography it may come to rival the Brandenburg Gate or the Eiffel Tower” (IWAN BAAN)
A simple enough metaphor, but then the acrobatics start. Great discs of fibreglass-reinforced concrete have been hurled together in a sprawling 350m crescent, with the deep holes between the fins glazed sunglasses-dark. Together they clutch an old Royal Palace as they aggregate and cantilever around a new piazza. The result is a startling structure that possesses an otherworldly beauty, like the desert.
As a vast piece of national iconography it may come to rival the Brandenburg Gate or the Eiffel Tower. It’s certainly up there with the Guggenheim Bilbao, the poster-building of putting places on the map, and an improvement on the most recent example of that ilk, the Louvre Abu Dhabi.
Of course, anything the UAE can do, Qatar must do better — the two remain at loggerheads, with Qatar placed under the least effective blockage of all time by its neighbours — but it’s remarkable that they used the same architect.
That is Jean Nouvel, still a black-clad Parisian punk provocateur at 73 going on 1968. He is not well known in the UK, where he built One New Change by St Paul’s in London, the “stealth” mall-cum-offices that enraged Prince Charles ten years ago and always looks in need of a hard scrub. Everyone has their off days and Nouvel has had a few.
However, this wasn’t one of them, and certainly not the culmination of 18 years’ work. Early in a 24-hour period in which all the stars aligned — by which I mean the prime minister of France, Johnny Depp and, er, Victoria Beckham turned up — he described the completed structure as “a typology of intersections”, which makes sense. It is, after all, a place of intersections, where tradition coexists with skyscrapers, where trade and migration and geopolitics mingle. Yet, in truth, it is its own typology — it is unique.
Inside, there are few concessions to the accepted ideas about how a museum should function. Ochre blades of stuc pierre (a technique that emulates carved stone) slice the space apart dramatically, floors slope and only the ceilings, with their cargo of projectors, seem prosaic. This means that specially commissioned films, including one by Peter Webber, the British director of Girl With a Pearl Earring, have to do much of the narrative work, bouncing off facets and buttresses. In fact, a proper hang is probably impossible, not that there’s much to hang — the one flaw in this particular crystal is that the half-a-billion-pound museum is a bit short on artefacts, if big on imagination.
Arranged chronologically, the museum does successfully tell the story of Qatar, starting with 400-million-year-old fossils and traversing piracy, pearls, purple dye and protectorate to the modern metropolis of Doha and the 2022 World Cup, all along a one-and-a-half-mile route. There are models of dhows, vitrines full of flints, amphoras and cannon balls — so clean and clear you can feel them on your teeth — and bucket-loads of jewellery, including the Pearl Carpet of Baroda, sewn with 1.5 million of them, which was commissioned in 1865 by a maharaja to cover the tomb of Muhammad in Medina.
The contents are not why people will come to visit. The building itself is enough. “All architecture makes a statement,” Nouvel said this week, and he’s right. Yet here, a single word might do. That word is incroyable.
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