The Anti-Vanity Museum

By unflinchingly acknowledging Qatar’s history of resource extraction and migrant labor, a set of four cultural institutions in Doha points the way to a new kind of Middle Eastern architectural project.

- James Taylor-Foster

The opening of the Louvre Abu Dhabi on Saadiyat Island was a strange, sultry affair. Statesmen and sheikhs mingled with the United Arab Emirates’ cultural elite beneath Jean Nouvel’s vast, skeletal dome—the spatial equivalent of a diamond-studded diplomatic handshake. The launch of the complex—a floating “medina,” in the description of its architect, albeit one too costly and structurally overwrought for its own good—gave rise to the uneasy sense of a public opening far past its sell-by date. While much shimmered and gleamed, a faint, if not persistent, whiff of the anachronistic drifted about the galleries.

Attitudes and aspirations are changing around the Persian Gulf. While the emirates, states, and kingdoms that compose the region have cemented their reputations as sun-drenched nurseries for architectural stunts, enthusiasm for the vanity project appears to be waning. The debate about what architecture can and should say about national identity and heritage is ratcheting up. In Qatar, a short boat ride across the Gulf from Saadiyat, these questions are being answered by way of praxis. Set against the backdrop of Doha’s very own gaggle of glass-sheathed towers, a recently completed collection of museums by London-based John McAslan + Partners, which repurpose four historic buildings, seeks a much-anticipated renewal of traditional, functional, and urban aesthetics.