Arch2O.com

Arch2O.com - Architecture & Design Magazine
After 10 years of birthing the idea of opening a Middle-Eastern branch of the Louvre, Louvre Abu Dhabi opens this week at last. Louvre Abu Dhabi is the result of collaboration between the Emirate of Abu Dhabi and France.
Designed by Jean Nouvel, the museum resides on Saadiyat Island in the Arabian Gulf. Louvre Abu Dhabi will contain 23 permanent exhibition spaces and galleries, in addition to a research center, an auditorium, and a kids? museum.
Photography: Marc Domage
“It is rather unusual to find a built archipelago in the sea,” Jean Nouvel said. “It is even more uncommon to see that it is protected by a parasol creating a rain of light.”
The project was designed to be a “museum city (medina),” mixing the Arab culture, modernity, and top-notch design and engineering all in one structure.  
The museum?s distinctive double-dome has a diameter of 180 meters. Its flawless geometry and intricate perforations provide the museum with shade and sun at the same time. The dome architecture was described to have “horizontal, perfectly radiating geometry; a randomly perforated woven material, providing shade punctuated by bursts of sun.”
Photography: Roland Halbe
The number of star-shaped perforations in the dome is 7,850, carrying showers of the sun to the interior of the museum. Jean Nouvel says that they are “reminiscent of the overlapping palm trees in the Unite...