Jean Nouvel

At the end of 2013 my KEO project management team moved from the Al Bida Tower into a new office which we shared with the project design architect AECOM. For the last six months I have been working on the 25th floor of perhaps the most iconic of all the towers in Doha.

The Doha Tower was designed by renowned French architect Jean Nouvel. After completion of construction in 2012 it was branded as Burj Doha by the owner, His Excellency Sheikh Saud bin Muhammed Al Thani. The public has noted the buildings “phallic form” suggestive of what Nouvel calls a “fully assumed virility.”

Doha Tower comprises 46 floors above ground, 3 floors below ground and a total gross floor area of approximately 110,000 m². It has no central core, leaving more internal space available to its occupants. The design is unique, the first skyscraper with internal reinforced concrete dia-grid columns, which form a cross (X) shape that connects with the eye-catching cylindrical facade.

"The space between the windows and the cladding allows for a narrow walkway on every floor, facilitating the cleaning and maintenance of the structure and provides a space for the installation of the after dark illumination of the building, an interchangeable pattern of gold and silver, giving Burj Doha a dynamic identity on the Doha waterfront."

The building’s other distinctive feature, experienced only by its occupants, is the bank of glass-enclosed elevators the launches tenants up through the inside of the structure at what for some is a dizzying pace. For me the experience is reminiscent of the videos of astronauts ascending the rocket gantry to their capsule on top of an Atlas rocket ship.

Nouvel’s other project in Doha is the National Museum of Qatar, a future sculptural masterpiece that is gradually taking shape from what upon my arrival appeared as an impossible pile of structural steel towered over by as many as eleven cranes.

"The museum will comprise a series of interlocking discs of varying dimensions and curvatures, which will form walls, ceilings, floors and terraces.

Each disc will be made of a steel truss structure clad in glass-reinforced concrete and the voids between discs will be glazed."