Petal Power

Inspired by Rare Desert Roses, Pritzker Prize–winning Architect Jean Nouvel Unveils His Latest Masterpiece, the National Museum of Qatar, to Elle Decor.

- Julie Lasky

IT’S NOT TOTALLY CRAZY. IT JUST SEEMS CRAZY.”

Jean Nouvel, the Pritzker Prize–winning French architect, is describing the system he used to build the National Museum of Qatar. Made of 250,000 different glass fiber–reinforced concrete elements fixed to a steel frame in curving sections, the building sprawls like scattered, overlapping petals at the edge of the Persian Gulf. The engineering drawings look like Piranesi drafted them after a few double espressos. And yet there is a structural logic, explains Nouvel, who is a master of complexity.

It is mid-February in Doha, the burgeoning capital of Qatar. The National Museum is scheduled to open in about one month, and for the first time the press is allowed a foot in the door. Exterior sketches have been circulating since 2010, but the galleries are a mystery. Was this building to be a showy piece of architectural ambition, a gorgeous sculpture wrapped around a very big box? Or would it be “crazy” inside and out, the kind of museum that drives its curators to despair?

It is thoroughly and completely irregular, Nouvel—clad in his habitual black—declares before leading a group of us on a tour. But it works because the collection, which includes elaborate multimedia displays, was developed in lockstep with the architecture. “It’s not an art museum,” he says.

Rather, the National Museum is a triumphant monument, an encapsulation, and a seminar on Qatar’s past, present, and future. It celebrates the forces that in little more than a century transformed a sparsely populated nomadic crossroads into a multifaceted state with a cultural agenda and a portfolio of attention-demanding architecture.