In 2008, Qatar Museums (QM) began work on the construction of a new museum in the most southern part of the Doha Corniche. The structure of the building, designed by the architect Jean Nouvel, is inspired by the form of desert roses. The complex plan possesses a clear ornamental dimension while simultaneously responding to the programmatic requirements of a major cultural facility.

Following upon this first conceptual line, the arrangement of the gardens and various access points to the museum offers a formal vocabulary evoking three ancestral landscape forms: the dune, mangrove, and rawdat. These landscape entities are not only the evidence and mark of powerful natural phenomena, but also the witnesses of a close cultural relationship between people and their environment.

The metaphorical landscape sets the historical Farik Al Salatah palace and the new museum building within an undulating topography and a lagoon-like environment, interspersed with a series of botanical, agricultural, and ornamental gardens. A textured concrete “dune” protects within its dips and hollows the lush vegetation of the rawdat. Along the path of the Corniche, these spaces come into contact with the water of an artificial mangrove. The landscape never offers itself to view in its entirety. The rises and falls of the space, along with the winding pathways through it, multiply its horizons and the ways in which it can be sensorially experienced.