Courtesy the Museum of Islamic Art, Doha, Qatar

A closeup of the Museum of Islamic Art (2008)

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MIA UNVEILED

Silk carpets, delicate manuscripts, and I. M. Pei's architecture are just some of the delights offered by the new Museum of Islamic Art in Qatar.

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MUSEUM OF ISLAMIC ART OPENS IN QATAR

The I.M. Pei–designed five-story museum, with a rich trove of more than 800 artifacts from Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, has been highly anticipated by the public.

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When the cultural ambassadors of Qatar asked I.M. Pei to design the new Museum of Islamic Art—destined, they hoped, to be the emirate’s answer to the Guggenheim in Bilbao—the 91-year-old architect was shown several choice sites on the Corniche, Doha’s palm-lined, bayside boulevard, which hosts this capital city’s imposing civic structures.

Pei eyed the boulevard up and down. Too cramped, he finally said. Then he gazed out at the glittering Persian Gulf. Why not build me an island?

In the gonzo geography of the Arabian Peninsula, of course, islands are plucked from the sea like pearls. Pei got his wish, and Doha has gotten a new museum that puts Qatar spectacularly ahead of the pack.

As the first of a tidal wave of major cultural buildings to crash on the oil-flush, bling-chasing Gulf—among them Abu Dhabi’s multibillion-dollar flock of museums designed by all-stars including Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel, Tadao Ando, and Zaha Hadid (who’s also sketching up an opera house for Dubai)—the Museum of Islamic Art, which opens November 22, sets a dauntingly high bar.

That’s in part because Pei asked the emir for one more favor: time. He embarked on a six-month odyssey to find the soul of Islamic architecture, studying mosques in Spain and Syria and the sheer-walled fortresses of Tunisia. The eureka moment came in Cairo, in the form of a 13th-century sabil, or ablution fountain, at the Mosque of Ahmad Ibn Tulun, with its spare, sun-drenched volumes and a plain, high dome.

Pei’s journey paid off in a remarkably successful synthesis between East and West. The architect’s crisp-lined, geometric forms— his glass pyramids at the Louvre, or the faceted planes of the National Gallery of Art’s East Building in Washington—are here powerfully energized by Islamic tradition. “In his travels to Iberia, and even to China and India, he grew very familiar with the cultural and ornamental diversity of Islamic architecture,” said Hiroshi Okamoto, an architect in Pei’s New York office who worked with the Pritzker Prize–winning master on the project. “He was trying to grasp the elemental form, the essence.”

With its faceted stone planes raked by the sun, the building makes a striking composition: a series of stacked, rotated volumes stepping back to a central tower. As in the traditional mosques Pei studied, the largely undecorated exterior gives way to filigreed ornament inside: coffered domes, an arcing grand staircase, and a stainless-steel chandelier inspired by renowned Mamluk craftsmanship. The five story- high atrium is crowned by a stainlesssteel dome. And north light pours in from a glass curtain-wall running the full height of the building, flanked by more than 40,000 square feet of gallery space, designed by Jean-Michel Wilmotte & Associés of Paris, housing a continent-spanning collection of manuscripts, ceramics, metalwork, and textiles. A two-story education wing connects to the main structure across a courtyard.

Rising majestically from the water, the building pays homage to Louis Kahn’s design for the National Assembly Building of Dhaka, Bangladesh, which Pei is known to admire. Like that complex, set on an artificial lake, the museum shines in its island site. Connected to the mainland by three 215-foot-long bridges, Pei’s building is set at a sharp angle to the formal date-palm allée, so its Chamesson limestone is lit from all perspectives. “Because of its sculptural form, the sun animates that building all throughout the day,” Okamoto said. Viewed from across Doha Bay, the building is an instant landmark. As its reflection scatters on the water, the building dissolves into a bit of looping Arabic script—an inky echo of the 16th-century manuscripts inside. "Qatar's Crown Jewel" originally appeared in the November 2008 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' November 2008 Table of Contents.