National Museum of Qatar

The National Museum of Qatar in Doha opened in its current building on March 28, 2019, replacing an earlier museum that had occupied the site since 1975. Designed by the French architect Jean Nouvel, the building takes its form from the desert rose, a crystal formation found in Qatar's arid terrain, and is built from large interlocking curved discs of varying sizes that intersect to create shaded cavities intended to protect visitors from the desert heat. The roughly 40,000-square-meter museum wraps around and incorporates the restored Old Amiri Palace, once the residence of Sheikh Abdullah bin Jassim Al Thani and a building central to Qatari national identity, at the heart of its site on the southern end of Doha's Corniche. The museum complex connects to the surrounding shoreline by two pedestrian bridges and one road bridge.