JEAN NOUVEL’S DESERT ROSE

AT THE END OF MARCH, THE EXTRAORDINARY NEW QATAR NATIONAL MUSEUM WAS INAUGUARATED WITH POMP AND GLITZ IN THE PRESENCE OF HUNDREDS OF PRESTIGIOUS GUESTS. FOR, MORE THAN A DESERT ROSE, THIS IS A BUILDING THAT EMBODIES THE FUTURE ASPIRATIONS OF THIS TINY GULF EMIRATE.

This is the story of an emir, an ex- Spice Girl, a former French president, a top model, a Hollywood actor and a Chinese activist who all came to Doha for the blooming of a desert rose. It sounds like the beginning of a modern-day Arabian fairytale, or more prosaically the first line of a dodgy joke. On 27 March, the world’s happy few rubbed shoulders at the opening of the Qatar National Museum whose architect, Jean Nouvel, has piled up of 539 reinforced-concrete discs, with diameters ranging from 14 to 87 m, in a pharaonic project that takes visitors on a 1.5 km route through its winding galleries. Among those present at the inauguration were the Emir of Qatar, Tamin Ben Hamad Al- Thani, Victoria Beckham, Nicolas Sarkozy, Naomi Campbell, Johnny Depp, Ai Weiwei, Miuccia Prada, Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst.

Commissioned at the turn of the millennium, the museum represents less a desert rose – the discs multiply until saturation, forming an abstract musical score – than the political and economic stakes of the 2.6-million-inhabitant Gulf monarchy, the cementing of its power in the region and the wider world being only the most obvious. In Doha, a few weeks before the inauguration, Nouvel recalled how his first proposal was rejected by the emirate. “I imagined a museum buried in the sand, like a canyon leading all the way to the sea and terminating in a vast aquarium. A true work of land art. ‘Too discreet!’ I was told. ‘We want something more visible.’ So, I tried to find an architecture that would symbolize the history of Qatar – because this isn’t an art museum but rather the museum of a civilization, the history of a desert people. The desert rose was thus a natural solution.” Transposing to a monumental scale the countless angles and intersections of natural gypsum

crystals was something of a technical feat. “The idea wasn’t to create an illusion,” insists Nouvel, “but to feel the architecture of the desert rose in every part of the museum.”

If Nouvel has won the hearts of Gulf princes – his projects include the 46-storey Doha Tower, the Louvre Abu Dhabi and a huge Saudi hotel complex – it’s because he’s a master at devising a unique solution for each site, providing his clients with the perfect steel-and-glass sales representative in the mad race for tourist dollars. An instrument of soft power, the National Museum of Qatar responds to the major challenge of transitioning from oil and gas to a service and tourist economy. For the museum’s inauguration, AMO – the research branch of Rem Koolhaas’s firm OMA – realized a temporary exhibition which examines the breakneck development of Doha over the last century. More than a dozen museums are currently under construction there, as Qatar prepares to host the 2022 World Cup, for which six new stadia will sprout from the desert sands. But it would be wrong to credit the construction of such an extraordinary building merely to its monetary draw. Qatar only gained complete independence in 1971 and, while it has firmly established power on the world stage, it hasn’t yet completed the process of nation building – the museum is also about creating a sense of belonging to a shared identity. “We had very few records about the history of Qatar,” explains Nouvel, who also designed the museography. “They were nomadic desert people, or pearl fishermen. So, I asked artists to create large-scale works that would evoke this past.” The visitor route through the building, which begins with Qatar’s geology and fauna before tackling the emirate’s recent history, culminates with artist-directed films projected at monumental scale onto the building’s curves. Jacques Perrin and Christophe Cheysson dive beneath the ocean; Abderrahmane Sissako captured Qataris of the 50s and 60s in the desert; Doug Aitken films the geology of oil exploration. While we might regret the mythologizing of the Al- Thani tribe, whose 19th century palace- birthplace is literally embraced by Nouvel’s museum, we could also see here the success of a French export, not only that of museum construction but also of royal nation building.