Monthly Archive for March, 2010

From dezeen.com…

French architect Jean Nouvel has unveiled his design for the new National Museum of Qatar. The museum will comprise a series of interlocking discs of varying dimensions and curvatures, which will form walls, ceilings, floors and terraces. Each disc will be made of a steel truss structure clad in glass-reinforced concrete and the voids between discs will be glazed. This new structure will be built around an existing palace.

From the Qatar Museums Authority…

Marking the next stage of its program to develop Qatar into a hub of culture and communications for the Gulf region and the world, the Qatar Museums Authority (QMA) today revealed its plans for the new National Museum of Qatar, as expressed in a striking and evocative design by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Jean Nouvel.

Embodying the pride and traditions of Qatar’s people while offering international visitors a dialogue about rapid change and modernization, the National Museum of Qatar will be the setting for a program in which entire walls become cinematic displays, “sonorous cocoons”, shelter oral-history presentations and hand-held mobile devices guide visitors through thematic displays of the collection’s treasures. Though built around an historic structure, the Fariq Al Salatah Palace, which had served as a museum of heritage since 1975, the National Museum of Qatar is conceived and designed as a thoroughly new institution, in keeping with the high aspirations that animate QMA. More…

From Manisha Verma at 3quarksdaily.com…

Visiting the California Academy of Sciences was like going to an undiscovered tropical jungle in a private patio next door. Not only had I had spent several months of gleeful obliviousness to its understated existence in the Golden Gate park right next door to my abode, I had relegated the rectangular block of grey concrete in my mind to a less glamorous cousin of the more prevailing de Young Museum located directly opposite it. I felt it looked like it would host a dry natural history equivalent of the interiors and proceeds of a City Hall or a United Nations jerry-build, only with an even more dull manuscript’s taste. I went for regular runs in the park for months, paying more heed and silent mental visits to the Japanese Tea garden and the botanical gardens, amidst the montage of foliage, chirping birds, scrawny lakes, tennis courts, a northern windmill and cascading waterfalls embellished with pudgy green ducks at their base.

On the day of the visit, the museum teemed with extraordinary biodiversity, but without the discomfort of spiders or stray rattlesnakes, and though obviously organized and mundane as a zoological park might feel, it gave you no excuse to dismiss it as remotely anything but real. On the upside, your attention could be fully applied to enjoying the assortment of a rain-forest as showy of its stuff as the Amazon, but you didn’t have to divert your energies to the heightened sense of self-preservation you tend to build in primeval wilderness. A four-story rainforest was bathed in acrid humidity and sounded of dripping water off the tips of giant leaves, and of frogs croaking to the beat of the jungle.  Macaws and other new world parrots were presented with equal emphasis as leafcutter ants, while carnivorous plants stood pretty and bulbed, inconspicuous to their prey. Strings of slimy toads and camouflaged lizards stood still like rocks and made me want to flit to the next exhibit fast enough, lest they emerge suddenly out of their seeming lifelessness into the reality of movement, which I wished to escape witnessing. Exotic ants, butterflies, geckos, lemurs, toads and plants from Madagascar, Borneo and Costa Rica were housed in their represented habitats. More…