National Museum of Textile Costume, Doha, Qatar
✍ Scribed by Kathryn Findlay
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 2006
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 127 KB
- Volume
- 76
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0003-8504
- DOI
- 10.1002/ad.347
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
The museum was designed in 2003-04 to embody the subject it is intended to house, namely the fabric, textiles and flowing costumes of the Gulf region. The building is an extension to an existing fort in Doha, the country's capital, and occupies a central courtyard and an extensive excavation below. The concept used the idea of a solid skein of threads, rather like a brush head. The notional 'threads' thickened to become the columns or vertical service ducts of the building, or delicate screens of the exhibitions, and the dense forest of threads was then carved out to create the exhibition spacesa weaving of ground into figure. Metal chain-mail mesh walls and thin wire meshes surface and screen interiors and exteriors throughout. Each thread creates a dot point pattern in plan, and the logic behind the resultant Islamic textile-based geometry informed design development. Specifically, as each dot point projected a radius, which described a circle and a matrix of touching and interlocking circles, the circles formed roof, ceiling and floor patterns. The upper-level space within the courtyard is roofed over to house a café. Its lace-patterned roof of water-cooled concrete allows light to penetrate, but also shields against intense solar gain. The grain is loose and porous, enabling the beautiful light of the region to flood in. This craftfully lit environment would enable Qataris to enjoy the focus of their national costumes in use. As visitors decend into the exhibition spaces below, the patterning grain of the space becomes finer and the space darker, the focus shifting to become the rich and intense beauty of the inner layers of Arabic dress on display. And in the cool of the evening, a public square above the main body of the museum is animated by a grid of vertical water-jets and light stands, creating an association with the patterns of the local costumes in the museum below.