The National Museum of Qatar stands in Doha at the south end of the Corniche. Jean Nouvel, a Pritzker Prize winner, designed it, drawing on the desert rose crystal found in Qatar. Qatar Museums owns it, and Hyundai Engineering & Construction was contracted for the main building in 2011. It was scheduled to open in 2016 but opened on March 28, 2019.
The building covers 430,000 square feet (40,000 m²). It is made of interlocking discs whose cavities shade visitors from desert heat. It rises from the sea and connects to shore by two pedestrian bridges and one road bridge. The galleries follow a loose chronological loop with about 8,000 objects.
The Old Amiri Palace, once home to Abdullah bin Jassim Al Thani, was refurbished in 2015 and is preserved as the museum's core. The article places the new building on the old museum's site in one passage and next to it in another.
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