Global Design: Futuristic, dreamy Doha for design lovers

DOHA, Qatar – Often overshadowed by glitzy neighbours Dubai and Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, the Qatari capital of Doha has invested extravagantly in its own skyline.

Many Doha landmarks have been boldly and memorably designed by the world’s top architects, including Dutchman Rem Koolhaas and Chinese-American I.M. Pei.

On a recent visit to Doha, I am as impressed by the architecture and photo opportunities of its museums and libraries as I am by their fine facilities and collections. The Qatar National Library and the Education City Mosque, both colossal yet intimate, are among the compelling designs.

It is a similar story as I wander through the Doha Design District.

This collection of buildings in downtown Doha opened in 2021 as a creative hub for architects, fashion designers, interior decorators and graphic artists. Visitors can admire its design exhibits, peruse its art galleries and use its co-working spaces.

Qatar is also pouring money and enterprise into creating significant design events. In 2024, it launched Design Doha, a major biennale that featured 14 venues and 24 exhibitions, attracting 118,000 visitors. It returns in April 2026 for a 10-week run.

Qatar’s drive in branding itself as a destination for design lovers seems successful. It is one of the world’s fastest-growing tourist destinations, recording a 25 per cent increase in visitors in 2024. Travellers are drawn partly, but also notably, to Doha’s space-age architecture.

Here are four architectural wonders that entwine the global and the local in Doha.

1. Qatar National Library

It is like a citadel of literature. More than one million books line the seemingly endless shelves of the avant-garde Qatar National Library.

Designed by Rem Koolhaas, the complex was intended to look like “two pieces of paper that are pulled apart and folded diagonally at the corners to create a shell-like structure”, according to the library’s website.  

Inside, natural light floods its reading hall through colossal floor-to-ceiling windows. Readers can peer down into the library’s subterranean museum or up along the tiers of tall shelves. 

Beautifully arranged in the library, which opened in 2017, are rare texts that document Islamic history and heritage.

The library has an array of high-tech features for use, from 3D-printing stations to sound-editing suites.

2. Education City Mosque

Rising out of the quiet western suburbs of Doha are two shimmering metallic towers that loom above its main building: a curved hall covered in mosaic-style tiles, laden with giant glass windows and accessed by a sweeping staircase.

From a distance, few would guess its true purpose. Up close, it becomes clear that those towers are adorned with Islamic calligraphy. This is one of the planet’s most futuristic sites of worship, the Education City Mosque. 

Along with the adjacent Qatar National Library, it is a flagship of Education City, Doha’s modern hub of universities, technology parks, cultural institutions and research facilities. Opened in 2015, the mosque was created by Iraqi architect Taha al-Hiti.

He embedded into its forward-thinking design many allusions to Islamic heritage. Al-Hiti intended the vertical calligraphy inscribed on the mosque’s minarets to lead the human eye towards the heavens.

Meanwhile, the mosque is slightly raised, as it rests on five columns that collectively symbolise the five pillars of Islam: prayer, fasting, pilgrimage, giving alms and profession of faith. 

Visitors can look inside its giant prayer hall, which can house 1,800 worshippers, and its similarly vast courtyard. Outside the mosque is a quartet of man-made streams which represent the rivers of Paradise mentioned in the Quran.

3. National Museum of Qatar

The National Museum of Qatar could be completely empty inside, and visitors would still flock to this facility. Few modern buildings on the planet are as photogenic as this cultural institution in downtown Doha.

French architect Jean Nouvel took inspiration from Qatar’s deserts. Those sprawling, parched environments have few living embellishments apart from the desert rose, a succulent shrub.

Nouvel set about sketching a structure with a multi-tiered roof and facade that would mimic the petal-like layers within each desert rose.

“Qatar has a deep rapport with the desert, with its flora and fauna, its nomadic people, its long traditions,” the architect said when the museum opened in 2017.

“To fuse these contrasting stories, I needed a symbolic element. Eventually, I remembered the phenomenon of the desert rose: crystalline forms, like miniature architectural events, that emerge from the ground through the work of wind, salt water and sand.”

Inside the museum, meanwhile, are stylishly laid-out exhibitions on Qatar’s environment, history and cultural heritage.

4. Museum of Islamic Art

At the end of a tree-lined promenade, on a man-made island jutting into the Persian Gulf, rises the building that sparked Doha’s modern makeover. In 1997, when Qatar decided to commission the Museum of Islamic Art, Doha’s cityscape was still low-rise and old-fashioned.

Its designer, the late I.M. Pei, created an unmistakable structure that is now considered the first of the Gulf’s many mega-museums.

Pei, who won the International Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1983, toured the Muslim world in search of inspiration before beginning work on the museum.

He found it in Cairo. There, in the Egyptian capital, he admired the Mosque of Ibn Tulun’s bold blend of sharp angles and curved domes, and its mesmerising geometric motifs.

As a result, the Museum of Islamic Art’s main building resembles a stack of boxes, with its multiple, angular levels one atop the next. Alongside are two corridors, each lined by a row of arches that lead to the adjoining library, which is home to 21,000 books.

Inside the museum, visitors enter a colossal five-storey atrium topped by a dramatic circular chandelier. At the rear, a 45m-tall window showcases views across the ocean to downtown Doha.