THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF QATAR

OR THE ROSE OF SABLES

it is Jean Nouvel, the inescapable visionary architect .Inaugured with great pomp on Wednesday, March 27th, the "rose of the sands" is the latest creation of the achitecte-star.

A rose of sands 350 m long and 34 000 square meters surface, which seems to emerge from the sand in the middle of the buildings on the corniche of Doha.

An entanglement of monochrome sand-colored discs. 539 petals ranging from 14 meters to 87 meters in diameter. The building flourishes on a large square, which Jean Nouvel has described as a "caravanserai, place of meetings and entertainment".

A huge pool and its 114 fountains signed Jean-Michel Othoniel.

"The rose of the sands is often considered by desert men as a lucky charm and it is also a mystery as to its manufacture for millennia.

But we did not know how she was inside and we find out today. Inside the museum, all the blades continue to cross and we will live there a series of discoveries of unpredictable spaces. "

Let's dive into this extraordinary institution that offers its visitors a real immersion, made possible by technological innovations, both visual and sound.

The interior is made up of eleven galleries running for 1.5 kilometers, and 7,000 square meters of exhibition space. No vertical, everything is curved, oblique, inclined.

Very advanced technologies to make you dizzy. The floor itself leans a little. "To build a building 350 meters long, with its large curved discs, intersections, cantilevered elements, it was difficult to meet enormous technical challenges," said Jean Nouvel, during the inauguration to the press.

A 1.5 km trail tells the story of Qatar since 7000 years little cluttered archaeological and ethnographic, Bedouins being nomadic.

To compensate for the absence of these pieces videos made by Jacques Perrin, the Mauritanian filmmaker Abderrhamane Sissako (Timbuktu) or the Indo-American Mira Nair. One finds oneself thus projected in a sandstorm, in the middle of the fishermen of pearls or still in the tent with Bedouins.

The museum traces the history of a country with three economic miracles:

the fishing of pearls, the discovery of oil and that of gas. Three "miracles" for this young state of Qatar who, in less than 50 years, went from tents in the desert and pearl fishing to a country with high GDP per capita.

On Wednesday evening, the National Museum of Qatar was inaugurated in the presence of the country's Emir, Prime Minister Philippe, Nicolas Sarkozy and Carla Bruni, and many stars like Johnny Depp, Naomi Campbell, Rem Koolhaas, or Jeff Koons.