00:00From a museum shaped like a desert rose, 539 concrete discs, and took 17 years to build,
00:06to four houses from the early 1900s, rebuilt with mangrove beams and seashell floors,
00:11and every wire buried beneath them. In this video, we're diving into how
00:15Qatar built some of the world's most impressive museums, starting with
00:19The Museum of Islamic Art. I. M. Pei was supposed to be finished. He had stepped away from Pei
00:25Cobb Freed & Partners in 1990, after the Louvre Pyramid, keeping only light consulting work.
00:30An international competition for a museum in Doha, organized around 1997 with support from
00:35the Aga Khan Trust for Culture shortlisted names like Charles Correa and Raysom Badran,
00:39and produced no building at all. So the emir, Sheikh Hamid bin Khalifa Al Thani,
00:43went to New York and asked Pei directly. Pei hesitated, he was retired, and he admitted
00:47he knew little about Islamic architecture. The emir did not take the hint. Pei accepted around 1999.
00:53What followed was roughly six months of travel. Cordoba, the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus,
00:58Fede Por Sikri, the Ribet Fortresses at Monaster and Sus. Most of it he rejected as too ornate,
01:03too regional, too hybrid. The answer waited in Cairo, in the 13th century ablution fountain in
01:08the courtyard of the 9th century mosque of Ahmed ibn Chalun, a square that becomes an octagon that
01:13becomes a dome. Then he refused every site Doha offered, afraid future towers would strangle his
01:17light. Qatar built him an island 60 meters offshore instead. I didn't choose it, I made it. He clad it
01:23in cream burgundy limestone, the same stone he used at the Louvre, with Virginia granite running to
01:28the waterline. It opened on 22 November 2008. Pei built on ground that didn't exist yet. The next
01:34architect grew a building out of a crystal. The National Museum of Qatar
01:39Commissioned around 2002, Jean Neuville's National Museum took 17 years to arrive, and the reason is
01:44obvious the moment you see it. Neuville took his form from the Desert Rose, clusters of gypsum
01:49crystals that form beneath the sand in arid coastal deserts, assembled by wind, salt spray and millennia
01:54into blades that interlock in patterns that look random but hold perfectly. He has described it as
01:59the first architectural structure nature builds on its own. Early concepts leaned quieter, almost land
02:04art. Qatar museums wanted a national icon, so the crystal was scaled up into a building. The result
02:09is 539 disks, in roughly 30 sizes and curvatures, ranging from about 14 meters across to 87. Some stand near
02:17vertical and carry load. Others lie flat and cantilever into canopies. They slice through one
02:22another at brutal angles, generating irregular galleries and deep pockets of shade. Together
02:26they loop roughly 350 meters, like a necklace, around the restored palace of Sheikh Abdullah bin
02:32Jassim al-Sani, rebuilt over three years by Berlin's ZRS architect and engineer. Hyundai Engineering and
02:38Construction took the main contract in September 2011 at $434 million. Beneath the skin, tens of thousands
02:45of tons of steel. Across it, roughly 76,000 fiber-enforced concrete panels from around 3,000 master
02:51molds. Move one wall, you move the structure. It opened on 28 March 2019. Neuville wrapped his
02:57building around a palace. In the Aspire zone, another architect wrapped his around a stadium.
03:02The 3-2-1 Qatar Olympic and Sports Museum
03:06Barcelona architect Joan Sabina, best known for the gaudy center in Ruz, was handed a problem most
03:12architects would resend. Build a landmark onto the side of somebody else's landmark. The Califah
03:16International Stadium dates to 1976 and would later be renovated as a 2022 World Cup venue.
03:22Sabina decided not to compete with it. He decided to hold on to it. His design, finalized around 2012,
03:28with construction beginning in 2015, splits into two volumes joined by a glass walkway. The first curves
03:34to follow the arc of the stadium's tallest flank, wrapped in rows of diamond-shaped paneling, a textured,
03:39deferential skin that reads as an extension rather than an intrusion. The second is the
03:44one that ended up on postcards, a cylindrical glass tower pushing outward, clad in rectangular
03:48panels that mirror the arena around them. Encircling that cylinder are five illuminated rings in the
03:54Olympic palette, set at deliberately different heights and angles so they read as interlocked
03:58rather than stacked. Between the rings and the glass sit horizontal jolly screens, the latticework
04:02used for centuries across the Islamic world for privacy and shade. Roughly 19,000 square meters,
04:07seven galleries, the first Arab institution admitted to the Olympic Museum's network. It opened in March
04:122022. Those three were built from nothing. The next started with a man quietly buying paintings nobody
04:18else was buying. Mathaf Arab Museum of Modern Art
04:22This one didn't begin with an architect. It began with a purchase, usually dated to 1986, by Sheik Hassan
04:29bin Mohammed bin Ali Al-Sani, a historian by training who had also studied studio art and who decided the
04:35modern art of the Arab world deserved to be collected seriously, at scale, by someone from
04:39the region. He collected for decades, work spanning roughly the 1840s to the present, with particular
04:44depth in Qatari, Iraqi, Egyptian, Lebanese and Syrian artists. Through the 1990s and early 2000s,
04:50the entire thing lived in two private villas in Madinat Khalifa. During that period, he did something
04:55collectors rarely do. He supported the living artists directly, providing residencies and studio space
05:00to Iraqi artists whose careers had been gutted by post-Gulf war sanctions. In 2004, he transferred the
05:06collection to the Qatar Foundation. By opening night, it exceeded 6,000 works. It has since grown past 9,000.
05:12For a home, Qatar chose a former school inside Education City and hired French architect Jean-Francois
05:18Baden to convert it. He delivered roughly 5,500 square meters, galleries, cafe, shop, research library, and a screen
05:24facade built to take projected film at night, reportedly in under a year for about 8 million euros.
05:29Mathaf opened on 30 December 2010, officially described as temporary. It's still there.
05:34Mathaf reused one building. A few kilometers away, an entire historic quarter was being saved the same way.
05:41M Sharab Museums
05:43Four houses all built roughly between 1900 and 1910, sitting in the historic core of Doha as the city planned
05:49a 31-hectare regeneration around them. Redwani House, Mohammed Bin Jassim House, Bin Jelmut House,
05:55Company House, they could have been flattened. Instead, John McCaslan Plus Partners was brought
06:00in to restore them, each becoming a museum with its own subject. Traditional family life,
06:05the transformation of Doha, the Indian Ocean slave trade, and Qatar's early oil industry.
06:10The restoration was researched down to the building method. Damaged fabric was reinstated using plastered
06:15gypsum rubble walls. Roofs were rebuilt with mangrove dantial beams, split bamboo,
06:20reed matting, and plaster to recreate the original ceilings. Courtyards were finished in places with
06:25sabin seashells. The harder problem was invisible. Modern museums demand climate control, flexible
06:30lighting, fire suppression, and floors rated for heavy objects, none of which historic plaster
06:35interiors will politely accommodate. Working with McCaslan, engineers at Bureau Happold buried the
06:39services. Trenches beneath the floors carry systems and draw cool air upward through perimeter grills.
06:44Overhead multi-service beams do structural work while concealing lighting tracks,
06:48speakers, alarms, and sprinklers. New interventions stayed restrained. The museums opened around 2015.
06:54That was heritage preserved by consultants. The next museum was assembled by one man who simply
07:00never stopped buying things. Sheikh Faisal bin Qasim Al-Thani Museum
07:05Sheikh Faisal bin Qasim Al-Thani, born in 1948, founder and chairman of the conglomerate Al-Faisal
07:11Holdings, started collecting as a child, fossils, stamps, toys, influenced by traveling with his
07:16father. As his business empire expanded into cars, aviation, and real estate, the collecting expanded
07:21with it, sweeping up regional artifacts, Islamic art, vehicles, and outright curiosities. By the late
07:261990s, it had outgrown any house on earth. In 1998, he opened the first public museum building on his
07:32farm at Al-Samria, about 20 kilometers northwest of Doha. His explanation is disarmingly simple.
07:38I used to collect items whenever I got the chance, and as the business grew, so did the collection.
07:43The buildings were purpose-built in traditional Qatari fort style from local stone, with turrets
07:47and a fortified gate. The estate has since sprawled to roughly 130 acres, absorbing an Arabian oryx
07:53reserve, a riding school, a date farm, and a five-star hotel. Inside sit over 30,000 objects,
07:58manuscripts, a kiswa covering, pearling, and Bedouin artifacts, more than 700 hand-woven carpets,
08:04hundreds of cars. One exhibit is an entire traditional Damascus house, dismantled,
08:09shipped, and reassembled indoors. Outside stands a mosque he designed himself,
08:13its minaret leaning about 20 degrees, monitored by roughly 30 sensors. One man turned a farm into
08:18a museum. Qatar museums turned a working fire station into an art school.
08:23Fire Station Artist-in-Residence
08:26Built in 1982, as the headquarters of Qatar's Civil Defense Authority, this was the country's
08:31first civil defense facility, and it worked as a functioning fire station for three decades.
08:36In late 2012, the last fire engine rolled out. Under Sheikah al-Maysa bint Hamid bin Khalifa al-Thani,
08:42Qatar museums decided the building shouldn't be demolished, it should be given to artists.
08:46Qatari architect Ibrahim al-Jayda, of the Arab Engineering Bureau, led the redesign,
08:50and his instruction to himself was restrained. The honeycomb facade, a climate-driven shading
08:55device in the building's defining feature, stayed. The tower stayed. The firefighter's pole stayed.
08:59So did the yellow fire engine doors kept as visual markers even after internal walls made
09:04them non-functional. Finishes remained raw, unfinished concrete minimal treatment,
09:08the working past left legible. The roughly 700-square-meter engine garage became the open-plan
09:14garage gallery. Renovation ran mainly through 2014, and the complex reopened in March 2015.
09:20It now holds artist studios, a woodshop and fabrication lab, a cinema and a cafe.
09:24Its core is the artist-in-residence program. Nine-month residencies for artists living in
09:29Qatar, ending in a group exhibition, in a country Sheikah al-Maysa describes as conservative but
09:34tolerant. The fire station kept its past on the surface. The final building buried its past six
09:39meters underground, on purpose. Qatar National Library
09:44Rem Koolhaas, Ellen Van Loon and Ead Alsaka approached the library as a refusal of everything libraries
09:49usually are. Dark, cellular, built to hide books nobody sees. Their answer was one room, roughly 42,000
09:55to 45,000 square meters of it, holding over a million books, all visible at once. As Koolhaas
10:00put it, the space was designed so, you can see all the books in a panorama. The form starts as
10:05a square,
10:06then lifts two corners off the ground, producing a shell-like shape with three sloping aisles of
10:10shelving terracing down toward a central triangular void. Visitors walk in beneath the raised corners and
10:15land in the middle of the collection. The shelves are the architecture, cut from the same white marble
10:19as the floors, carrying lighting, ventilation and the book return system inside them. Then the
10:24brief changed. What began as a university library became the National Library, and was then asked
10:29to absorb Qatar's heritage collection, rare manuscripts, maps and globes numbering in the
10:34hundreds of thousands. Koolhaas has said the only remaining option was to dig. So they excavated a
10:39six-meter-deep sunken zone at the center, clad in travertine, and laid out like a dig site.
10:43Van Loon called it a heritage library, excavated from the ground like an archaeological site.
10:48It opened in 2018.
10:50Thank you for watching. If you enjoyed watching this video,
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