FT: A monument to the possible

A monument to the possible

By Edwin Heathcote

Published: May 17 2008 01:48 | Last updated: May 17 2008 01:48

Standing on an artificial island off Doha’s harbour, Qatar’s new Museum of Islamic Art looks like a leftover from an epic Atlantean production. It has that stage-set flatness, and that odd cocktail aesthetic of ancient past, postmodern and off-key speculation that characterises science-fiction future-worlds. Blockbusters demand visions that suggest something hovering between utopia and dystopia, the wonders of imperial Rome tempered with the eerie megalomania of Mussolini’s version. In the searing sunshine of Qatari daytime, it has a cheesiness about it, a dated, sub-art-deco chunk seated self-satisfied between a pair of operatic obelisks.

But as you approach, it gets better. Suddenly the chunky stonework and sharp edges begin to make sense, it becomes more as you’d imagine a castle or a citadel must have looked when new, powerful but crafted. Then, once inside, everything resolves itself. This, you realise, is real architecture.

The museum is the work of Ieoh Ming Pei, the Chinese-American architect of the Louvre Pyramid and, at 91, it’s being billed as his final work. He apparently had to be cajoled into accepting the commission at all. Once he took it on, however, he embarked on a grand tour of Islamic architecture and, unlike some architects who seem to accept commissions in the Gulf as virtual sculptures, designing a shape and letting the workers get on with it, Pei has obviously taken his work very seriously indeed. After studying Islamic monuments around the world, Pei settled on a small fountain for ablutions outside the 9th-century mosque of Ahmad ibn Tulun in Cairo – from this, he derived his inspiration for the museum.

The sense of arrival is sharpened by the entry over a short footbridge (although VIPs can arrive by boat in a Venice-style landing) and, once inside, you are struck by a central space of impressive intensity and complexity. Culminating in a silvered faceted dome that shimmers 50m above the cool atrium, the heart of the building is a generous and dynamic space across which steel bridges fly and from which galleries shoot off in all directions. The height and the calm grandeur take you completely, satisfyingly, by surprise.

There is the slightest, unfortunate hint of a panopticon – Jeremy Bentham’s idealised prison plan, which allowed warders to monitor all prison wings from a single point – but, as it also evokes so many other typologies from mosque to palace courtyard, perhaps we can forgive that. There is also a terrace courtyard with a fountain at its centre and arcades giving on to a tantalising view of the sparkling sea of the harbour, a seductive space that reveals the depth of Pei’s immersion in Islamic form.

There are a few more odd blends of style and motif – cast-concrete ceiling panels that resemble late-colonial British brutal (a 1960s office or hospital in Africa, say), bridges that would look more at home in an airport, furniture that would look more at home in a corporate lobby – but somehow it hangs together, and well. Pei is too old and too clever to worry about fashion. This looks like a good museum that could have been built in the early 1970s: it exemplifies a kind of solid, Platonic modernity that has fallen way out of fashion.

The gallery design has been done by Jean-Michel Wilmotte, the current globetrotting darling of the arts interior. It was still being installed when I was there and security and secrecy were fanatical, but it looked good – dignified, careful, considered. The collection is astonishing, with items ranging from the seventh to the 19th centuries. A 10th-century bronze fountain head from Andalusia, a 10th-century Iraqi astrolabe and an extraordinary 14th-16th-century silk carpet from Samarkand illustrated with a strange blend of garden and chessboard are among the 700 exquisite items that make up the display.

Price has been no object. The Qatari royal family have been acquiring at a rate that has led almost to hyper-inflation in the market. The depth and range of the acquisitions suggests the seriousness with which the royal family is addressing their museum building programme. Pei’s delayed but wonderful building is obviously only the first step. The surrounding harbour is due to be developed into a cultural district bristling with new museums, a cultural ambition similar to that of Abu Dhabi with its vast development at Saadiyat Island and Dubai with its plethora of art fairs and museum plans.

The idea is apparently to lay a solid foundation for culture in the region, making it a “destination”. The question remains, however, for whom? Unlike traditional cultural hotspots such as Paris, London or, New York, these are tiny states with tiny populations. Qatar has less than a million inhabitants and, unlike Dubai, it is hardly an established tourist destination.

But Qatar’s ambitions stretch beyond the immediate future. The 2,500-acre Qatar Foundation campus under construction just outside Doha will house branches of Cornell and Georgetown universities, and an impressive list of international architects from the site’s masterplanner Arata Isozaki to Rem Koolhaas is drawing up plans. Qatar is determined to become the region’s educational and cultural hub (as, of course, is Abu Dhabi).

The Museum of Islamic Arts is a confident beginning. Heretical as this may sound, I have never been convinced by IM Pei’s work. The last building I saw of his, the modern art museum in Luxembourg, is a stolid chunk of past-its-sell-by-date pudding, a truly unmemorable building. But the Qatar Museum is in another league. Pei may see this as his swansong, and he has invested it with feeling and a kind of monumentality that stands in stark contrast to the glassy, superficial skyscrapers emerging on the Doha skyline like a high-tech fungus. It was Pei’s decision to put the museum offshore, to stop the city’s commercial architecture encroaching on its setting. Despite its clunky, stage-set exterior, with its overtones of everything from Assyria to art deco, Pei has built an extremely fine museum. It is a building that – curiously – straddles modernism’s late heroic phase, the post-modernism that destroyed it and the new modernist consensus that has emerged since. It will be intriguing to see who uses it, whether or not it works as an anchor to this hugely ambitious programme, and whether Qatar can live up to it.

Edwin Heathcote is the FT’s architecture critic. For more coverage of the region go to www.ft.com/gulf

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008