OFFICE 204

An ambitious competition brief called for a new museum of contemporary art on the 83,500m2 site of a former flour mill on the bay of Doha. Developed in collaboration with l’AUC, the project takes the notion of an archetypal marketplace as its structure. The existing silos are reused and – together with new columns, a highway ramp and a ‘warehouse’ envisaged as the museum’s main interior art space – carry a gigantic single-storey roof. This roof is a condensed urban space containing galleries, offices and public amenities as well as a parking lot. Below it, a newly created green public space offers shelter from the harsh heat and light. Next to the exhibition spaces – the silos and the warehouse – the debris of demolished buildings forms a hill of rubble which acts as a found object in the artificial landscape.