A peek into the AMO-designed + curated “Making Doha 1950-2030” exhibition at the National Museum of Qatar

Inside the new Jean Nouvel-designed National Museum of Qatar that opened last week, the “Making Doha 1950-2030” exhibition explores the ongoing urban and architectural development of the capital city. The curation team included Rem Koolhaas and Samir Bantal of OMA/AMO and Fatma Al Sehlawi, and the research team from the Qatar-based Atlas Bookstore.

Designed by a team from AMO/OMA, the exhibition is designed as a timeline. Enclosed by a 115-meter-long curtain printed with historical collages, the exhibition is divided into four sections spanning 70 years of photos, architectural models, plans, texts, films, oral histories, and archival materials.

“Among the local population it found the agents, often educated abroad, who were able to channel the fluid and oral procedures of Arab tradition over time into a coherent framework of stable terms as the foundation of a municipal bureaucracy that could begin to ‘plan’, an entirely new concept in a culture used to organic growth,” Rem Koolhaas writes in his curatorial statement. “Typically a learning curve eventually flattens out. By relentlessly placing tremendous challenges before itself—a major airport, the World Cup, the Olympics, new cultural institutions like Qatar Museums, and Education City—Qatar put itself in a situation where the curve constantly became steeper.”

The exhibition is now on display through August 30, 2019.