In pics: National museum of Qatar opens for public

DOHA: National museum of Qatar is opening for the public from today. The 560,000-square-foot Museum is designed by Jean Nouvel.

Sheikha Amna bint Abdulaziz bin Jassim Al Thani, director of the National Museum of Qatar said, “We believed we had the potential to go beyond even the most exciting existing museum displays and develop something truly immersive. And we believed the substance of those experiences ought to come from the Qatari people themselves.”

A mile-long path through the museum’s alien, spacecraft-like discs starts where it all began—literally. A film rushes through 700 million years of life on Earth, with fossils and animal models on display. The succeeding galleries move on to human life on the Qatari peninsula, with films and artifacts about life in the desert and the once-lucrative pearling trade.

It’s the second half of the museum that brings the history of Qatar, tracing the tribal conflicts that culminated with the rise of the Al Thani ruling family. Then it’s on to oil and gas, and the discoveries that dramatically transformed what was historically an obscure desert peninsula into indispensable cog in global energy security.

“To construct a building 350 meters long, with its great big inward-curving disks, and its intersections and cantilevered elements—all the things that conjure up a desert rose—we had to meet enormous technical challenges,” said the building’s architect, Jean Nouvel, in a statement. “This building is at the cutting-edge of technology, like Qatar itself.”

(Agencies)