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It is the latest of the monumental museums of the Gulf and the new pride of Qatar. The sublime rose of the giant sands signed Jean Nouvel houses the new national museum of the emirate. It was inaugurated in splendor Wednesday night in Doha, at a celebrity-led ceremony led by the Emir, Sheikh Tamim Ben Hamad Al-Thani. For glamor, stars of global art like Jeff Koons or Ai Weiwei, fashion figures such as Naomi Campbell or Victoria Beckham, football coach Jose Mourinho or actor Johnny Depp were present. On the political side, the Kuwaiti emir Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Jaber al-Sabah - who unlike other Gulf monarchies did not break with Qatar and French side former President Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife - participated. Carla Bruni, as well as Prime Minister Edouard Philippe on a working visit.
Set on the Doha Corniche, the 52,000-square-meter building impresses with its 539 petals ranging from the smallest diameter (14 meters) to the largest (87 meters), all of variable curvature. This Rose des Sables is an architectural curiosity sublimated by technology. Outside, by its incredible composition of interwoven horizontal and vertical disks. Like inside, with its eleven galleries running for 1.5 kilometers. The project was resumed from scratch, with the arrival, in 2013, of the Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, sister of the Emir of Qatar, who now chairs the Qatar Museums Authority (QMA).
With an estimated cost of $ 434 million (unconfirmed figure), the National Museum of Qatar is all the more important for Doha that was completed under the economic and diplomatic blockade imposed since the summer of 2017 by its former allies Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. Ryad and his allies accuse Qatar of not taking enough distance from Iran, the Shia rival regional power of Saudi Arabia Sunni, and support radical Islamist groups, which Doha denies.
Jean Nouvel
High silhouette with shaved head, always dressed in black Jean Nouvel likes to talk about his last baby. Its beige color (the skin of the building was made of high-performance fiber-reinforced concrete) is that of desert sand. Discreet, it is changeable according to the hours of the day. To merge with the sea. These two strong elements of the country's geography are constantly recounting in the speech of the architect who also conceived the interior museography: a journey from low ceilings to large breakaways, with a floor always sloping, walls at an angle.
Total immersion
The museum tour is astonishing. It tells the incredible fate of a small nomadic people become in a few decades immensely rich thanks to pearls then to oil and gas. To fully appreciate this museum, you have to find a child's look, play the game of interactive attractions, without depriving you to admire the precious collections of jewelry or ancient art. We are not in a classic museum with works hanging on the walls. Besides, there is none. The goal is to immerse the visitor in a total immersion, visual, sound and sometimes even physical, it can be pleasantly disoriented.
7000 square meters of permanent exhibition space (1700 for temporary ones), the course unfolds the national narrative of Qatar. Produced by directors and videographers ( Land and see directed by Jacques Perrin and Christophe Cheysson or Al Zubarah by Mauritanian director Abderrahmane Sissako), short films (3 to 20 minutes) adapted to the shapes and scale of the walls are poetic and evocative testimonies of the natural wealth or the Bedouin past of Qatar. Many documents also trace the reign of the AL-Thani family over the country for 150 years.
Modernity and tradition
The Rose of the Sands is built around the Royal Palace of Sheikh Abdullah bin Jassim Al Thani, a newly restored heritage jewel of Qatar. It overlooks the great square that the architect likens to a "caravanserai, place of meetings and animation". The discs of the rose form shadows to make the building energy efficient. Below, overlooking the cornice, a pool is animated by 114 fountains, sculptures, reeds of black pearls that draw letters of Arabic calligraphy and are signed Jean-Michel Othoniel. This is one of the commissions given to international contemporary artists to anchor this museum in the 21st century.
Jean Nouvel, laureate of the prestigious Pritzker Prize who also designed the Louvre Abu Dhabi inaugurated in 2017 in the UAE has forbidden to work for undemocratic regimes. " I work at the level of the century or centuries, for the people, not for a person punctually in power, " he says, ensuring that guarantees and checks were made to the workers who worked on his construction site. This is one of the criticisms made in Qatar in permanent works and whose towers and cranes pierce the sky in the perspective of the next World Cup football in 2022.