The dome and the rain of light
Jean Nouvel (Born 1945) · 2007 to 2017
Walk out of the galleries into the plaza and stop. Above you floats a flat silver dome one hundred and eighty metres across, and the floor, the white walls and the water around you are covered in slowly moving spots of light. Jean Nouvel called this the rain of light. He imagined the museum as a small Arab town of white houses on the water, shaded by a single great palm canopy, and the dome is that canopy: eight layers of metal lattice, four outside and four inside, whose star-shaped openings are offset so that light must pass through nearly eight thousand pieces before it reaches the ground. Only a small fraction gets through, which keeps the plaza cool.
Look at how the pattern changes as the sun moves. In the morning the spots are sharp and small; by late afternoon they stretch into long ovals and turn gold; at night the dome is lit from beneath and reads as a field of stars. Nouvel took the geometry from the interlaced stars of Islamic ornament and from the light that filters through the palm fronds of a souk roof. The whole structure weighs about seven and a half thousand tonnes, roughly the weight of the Eiffel Tower, and rests on only four hidden supports, so from inside it seems to hover. The sea flows in beneath it through channels, and at the edges the dome opens directly to the sky.
The building took a decade to design and construct and was inaugurated in November 2017. Beneath the dome are fifty five separate buildings, twenty three of them galleries, each a white box with a different height, so that the museum feels like a neighbourhood rather than a single hall. The best moment is the hour before sunset, when the light spots slide up the walls and the water throws their reflections back onto the underside of the dome.
Did You Know? The dome weighs about as much as the Eiffel Tower, yet it rests on only four supports hidden inside the buildings, so it appears to float above the plaza.
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