Author: Nostalgic_Hedgehog

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The National Museum of Qatar

The Desert Rose: Combining Environmental and Cultural Connotations

National museums generally function as a country’s defining statement of their cultural and national identity(Newton, 1996). In Qatar’s case, the desert rose which is a mineral formation of crystal clusters made out of sand grains has been embodied as a national symbol in the National Museum of Qatar. The architect of the museum, Jean Nouvel, sought to exemplify Qatar’s national identity by using a naturally occurring sediment. This notion of relating a specific landscape to the concept of national identity is not peculiar of its kind. According to Smith, one of the most significant parameters that shape a nation’s identity are symbols, memories, values, and traditions (Smith, 2002). In Qatar’s case, it is the desert rose that is being used as a bridge between nature and culture. Nouvel is illustrating this “contradiction” by exemplifying Qatar’s historical timelessness and its contemporary economic ascendancy to evoke sentimental feelings toward its past. However, the nature-culture binary has been a widely contested topic in environmental humanities. In my essay, I will be exploring the evocative implications of Nouvel’s claim of the desert rose as a timeless symbol of Qatari identity. In addition, I will be looking at literature from ecocritics such as William Cronon, Timothy Clark, and the “After Oil report” to explore the nature/culture binary that Nouvel has outlined in his architectural aims.

 Following the trend of deconstructing the nature/culture binary in environmental humanities literature, William Cronon, an environmental historian and author of “The Trouble with Wilderness”, asserts that the concept of wilderness is not entirely man-made, but cultural perceptions alter our understanding of it (Cronon, 1995). Our modified dualistic vision of nature concedes to us to be dismissive of the experience of nature. Cronon brings forth the concept of romantic primitivism, which is an offshoot of romanticism that idealizes the concept of an uncivilized man that creating an aesthetic idealization that aspires to recreate a primitive experience. In addition, romantic interpretations of nature celebrate it in a sentimental sense and eventually morphed it into a nationalistic sentiment. This glorification of the wilderness experience positions humans as separate and against nature. We could see that Jean Nouvel’s attempt to recreate a “timeless” experience from the desert rose structure is essentially falling into the guise of romantic primitivism. By presenting the desert rose structure as a cultural symbol, he is trying to evoke reminiscent feelings of Qatari’s past. He states that “Symbolically, its architecture evokes the desert, its silent and eternal dimension..”(Nouvel, 2019). He is creating an illusion of a barren desert existing in an industrialized city with this semblance impending on the oversight of humanity in detaching nature and culture from each other. In addition, his symbolism romanticizes the idea of the desert as something inherently more cultural. As we know, romanticism has influenced the idea that communities shape their national identity through relationships with their geographical landscape(Smith, 2002). Nouvel is attempting to elicit an idea of the primitive past as represented by the desert rose, creating a spectacle out of it. Entering the National Museum of Qatar–which is shaped like a desert rose–stimulates feelings of entering the past that was once merely a desolate desert, and experiencing history through the art and archeological exhibits relating to Qatar’s culture. But upon exiting the museum, one is immediately hit with the stark reality of the industrialized city of Doha which is far removed from the desert simulation that was once experienced. This was Nouvel’s goal, he aimed to create a primitive experience to showcase the “contradiction” between its primitive past and industrialized present. His glorification of Qatar’s past has created a separation between the Qatari people and their past as though they could merely enter and exit the past. This illusion that Nouvel created has essentially domesticated the idea of a romanticized version of Qatar’s history.

Another author, Jason Moore who is the author of “The Rise of Cheap Nature” also takes issue with this culturally engineered concept of a nature/culture duality. As an eco-Marxist, he believes that we need to consider the ‘Capitolocene’ as an alternative geological epoch instead of the ‘Anthropocene’ because humanity exists in a patterned historical system and it represents the irreversible human interference starting from the Industrial Revolution. Furthermore, nature and society are not two separate categories but actually are ideas that are co-constitutive. He rejects the notion of green arithmetic, which is the mode of thinking that suggests nature and society are separate entities (Moore,2016). In addition, capitalism birthed a law of value, or cheap nature, in terms of expanding the capacities of global capitalism based on the ‘cheap’ extraction of natural resources, thus devaluing nature. Building on Moore’s notion of the ‘Capitolocene’, we must ask ourselves if humanity’s capitalist behavior has had an irreversible impact on the environment, then how could Nouvel’s claims of the desert rose to have a ‘timeless’ feature hold? Declaring that a geological formation has a timeless component implies that it stands the test of time regardless of the dynamic feature of the country. The Capitolocene tells us that humanity’s relationship with nature has changed due to capitalism, meaning that nature and culture have always worked hand-in-hand because this relationship is a historical process. Essentially, the relationship that the Qatari population had with the barren desert, signified by the desert rose, is a different historical feature than that of the contemporary petro-fuelled relationship the Qatari population has with their land. Nouvel is placing nature in a separate historical process from that of culture as he calls it a “contradiction”. This obscures the relationship between the Qatari population and their land because nature and culture are seen as separate but not co-constitutive. Thus, the desert rose cannot be a timeless component of Qatar’s identity because the desert rose is presented as something that exists in a separate historical process, one that subsists in a barren desert. In addition, illustrating the desert rose as a symbol of Qatar’s national identity is a relatively new concept. During my research on the historical significance of the desert rose, I found that this notion did not exist prior to the opening of the National Museum of Qatar in 2019. This paints a different picture of Nouvel’s intentions behind using the desert rose to represent Qatar’s identity. The desert rose is being marketed as a cultural phenomenon in order to sell a romanticized idea of Qatar’s past. This contends with Moore’s idea of cheap nature since the museum is attaching a certain value to Qatar’s landscape, and ultimately devaluing it.

The “After-Oil” report defines our contemporary post-industrial as an oil society that is shaped by oil in physical and material ways (the Petrocultures Research Group, 2016). Taking into consideration the concept of the Anthropocene and our petro-fuelled society, the report theorizes that our culture is dependent on petroleum and that we cannot imagine our existence without it, hence the term petro-culture. Petromodernity either continues or ends under disastrous circumstances for human populations, highlighting the urgency of the issue and the urgent necessity to switch from fossil fuels to an alternate system. In addition, petro-culture hinders the possibility of a genuine global transition away from fossil fuels. Looking back at my earlier blog post about petro-culture, Nouvel made it clear that one of his archeological aims is to highlight Qatar’s economic prosperity as a result of the discovery of oil (Nouvel, 2019). Nouvel is essentially implying that Qatar’s modernity is exclusively correspondent to oil and gas by creating this natural past/petro-fuelled modernity dynamic, but the reality is that petro-modernity is only a specific form of modernity that is explicitly the result of our energy usage and should not encompass the entire idea behind modernity. His insistence that the true heritage of Qatar only lies in its pre-oil past hinders an attempt to imagine a future beyond fossil fuels for Qatar. The notion of an oil-dependant Qatari society actually causes a dissolution of Qatar’s culture and heritage, causing an eco-bio-cultural extinction that cannot foresee a culture without petroleum’s existence which puts the culture that is being portrayed to the Qatari public as a scarce resource that is bound to be extinct. In essence, the picture that Nouvel has painted to the public of Qatar as a hyper-industrialized country not only obscures the Qatari people from their past but also their present. 

In conclusion, there is a huge responsibility put on the National Museum of Qatar to showcase Qatar’s national identity. Given the three secondary sources, I think that Nouvel’s efforts to portray the desert rose as a culture/nature duality obscures the Qatari public’s relationship with their history and present. Nouvel’s emphasis on the ‘timelessness’ of the desert rose further complicates the connection between Qatar and its natural resources, which is not timeless, because it changes according to accelerations of global capitalism. In addition, using the desert rose to invoke sentimental feelings of the past emphasizes the eviction of Qatari culture to its nature because it is being presented as a duality. The evocative implications of Nouvel’s architectural aims re-emphasize a romanticized version of Qatar’s landscape and blur the idea of a society that is co-constitutive with its nature. Nouvel’s rhetoric of the desert rose as a ‘timeless’ cultural symbol serves the interests of marketing efforts to sell a romanticized idea of Qatar’s culture and history. This case study is important to consider when discussing nature/culture binaries because it shows us that our current cultural narratives are dependent on the idea of our geographical landscape that exists in a specific historical process. 

Works Cited

Root, D. (1996). : Museums and the making of “ourselves”: The role of objects in national identity . Flora E. S. Kaplan. American Anthropologist, 98(4), 921–922. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1996.98.4.02a00680 

CRONON, W. I. L. L. I. A. M. (n.d.). The trouble with wilderness: Out Of The Woods, 28–50. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt7zw9qw.8 

Bridge, G. (2019). After oil by Petrocultures Research Group. Great Plains Research, 29(1), 41–42. https://doi.org/10.1353/gpr.2019.0005

Moore, Jason W., “The Rise of Cheap Nature” (2016). Sociology Faculty Scholarship. 2. https://orb.binghamton.edu/sociology_fac/2

National Museum of Qatar. Ateliers Jean Nouvel. (n.d.). Retrieved November 12, 2022, from http://www.jeannouvel.com/en/projects/musee-national-du-qatar/ 

Smith, A.D. 2002. “When is a nation.” In Geopolitcs 

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National Museum of Qatar: Sustainable by a Small Scale

The architect of the Qatar National Museum, Jean Nouvel, has been praised by several media outlets for building the “only museum in the world to have achieved high sustainability ratings from multiple internationally recognized and independent bodies.” What are the aspects of the museum that gives it this ‘sustainable’ reputation? Firstly, the
desert rose design is meant to be practical as it acts as an insulator from direct sunlight, minimizing the need for extensive cooling mechanisms. Secondly, the museum encourages visitors to think green by giving priority to electric cars in the parking lot, creating pedestrian and bicycle lanes, and making access to the metro station easier. Now that we know the aspects of the museum that would deem it sustainable, we need to think about its practicality. Nouvel designed this museum in hopes of connecting
the people to the Qatari culture by modeling it after the desert rose, which is a crystal cluster of barytes that is native to the Gulf region, and gaining notoriety for its ‘sustainable’ twist on cultural artifacts. We can see that Nouvel had sustainability in mind in the blueprints of the museum as evidenced by the way the disks are set up to insulate the sun. We can agree on the surface level that these efforts to become a sustainable
building are renowned in their own right, however, how effective is it in lowering the use of carbon emissions in Qatar? One ecocritic, Timothy Clark, examines the cultural criticism modes by emphasizing their blindness to the scale effects in his essay “The Derangements of
Scale”. More specifically, Clark draws on the derangements that resulted from the crisis of scale in environmental movements or slogans. When faced with environmental issues, humanity tends to make itself into a unitary subject and as a result group every environmental issue into a single movement. These jumps from scales tend to make our
sustainable habits unprogressive at a larger scale. The real damage comes from profit- seeking corporations or institutions. With Clark’s ‘Derangements of Scale’ in mind, we can ask ourselves if the
sustainable efforts by Qatar National Museum could be a derangement of scale effects. What does the museum’s prioritization of electric cars in the parking lot instead of carbon-fuelled cars do for the environment if these cars are still allowed on the premises and most of the interior and exterior structure is made out of carbon? This is a clear example of deranged scale effects in Clark’s essay. It is a deceptive fix to environmental
issues because these electric cars are manufactured in a place that is polluting emissions. The structure’s sustainable disks that lessen the need for cooling could also be a deceptive fix. Nouvel has not minimized the problem by reducing the need to cool the building because there are still central cooling systems in the museum, unnecessary use of lights even after closing hours, and gift shops that ironically sell plastic models of the
desert rose. The examples above show that these sustainable efforts of the museum to lower carbon emissions will become distorted when looking at it on a grander scale. What is the point of receiving ‘the most sustainable museum’ award, giving priority to electric cars, and lowering the need to cool the building if, in the grand scheme of things, these efforts will not make a difference in lowering carbon emissions, everything around the museum will continue to use carbon emissions, especially considering they are a corporation that profit off the use of carbon emissions.

https://qm.org.qa/en/stories/all-stories/sustainable-nmoq/
http://www.jeannouvel.com/en/projects/musee-national-du-qatar/

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The Desert Rose: National Museum of Qatar

Architect Jean Nouvel’s desert rose design for the Qatar National Museum aimed to embody Qatar’s rising economic superpower and technological advances achieved through the last decade by petroleum and natural gas. He describes the desert rose structure to have an “eternal dimension,” implying that Qatar’s desert minerals will always stand against the test of time, especially after industrialization. But if we think about the concept of the Anthropocene, which is a proposed geological epoch dating from the onset of significant human impact on Earth’s geology and ecosystems that is widely contested, could that conception be true in Nouvel’s description of the desert rose’s symbolic significance? If we are living in a world where humans have had an irreversible impact on the environment, then how can the desert rose be timeless?
To answer this question we must look at where that epoch could’ve theoretically begun. While these proposed commencement dates have been contested, I will be using the Industrial Revolution as the starting point for the inception of the Anthropocene. In that sense, industrialization has caused irreversible damage to the environment. However, author Jason Moore takes issue with the term ‘anthropocene’ because it implies that humanity is a ‘homogeneous acting unit’ when it actually exists in a patterned historical system. Instead, he suggests that the term ‘Capitolocene’ is more appropriate to use in this context since we could trace back humanity’s interference with the environment with that of capitalist motives. If we consider the notion that humanity’s capitalist takeover has altered the Earth’s dynamics forever, then that would mean that Nouvel’s symbolism is inaccurate.
Nouvel presents his symbolism of the desert and the industrial life of Qatar as two contradicting entities He mentions that here: “Symbolically, its architecture evokes the desert, its silent and eternal dimension, but also the spirit of modernity and daring that have come along and shaken up what seemed unshakable. So, it’s the contradictions in that history that I’ve sought to evoke here.” His work contends with Moore’s concept of ‘green arithmetic’, which is the assertion that Moore rejects. It states that the world is divided into two separate categories: Nature and society. Moore argues that separating nature and society into different compartments is “ a peculiar mental artifact of capitalism” which potentially justifies this system, since nature exists outside society then it could be rationalized to degrade and exploit the land for economic reasons. Instead, Nouvel should present humanity as a part of nature since society has shaped the environment given what we know about the Capitolocene.
I think that Nouvel was trying to combine the eras of Qatar as one to invoke reminiscent feelings of the past: the desolated desert of Qatar and the industrialized and economically powerful Qatar. But if we take a closer look at the literature behind the Capitolocene posed by Moore, it would then represent capitalism as overtaking the evocative cultural aspect of Qatar. If the specks of humanity eternally alter the environment, then the desert rose is merely a distant memory of Qatar’s past.

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The Desert Rose: National Museum of Qatar

Architect Jean Nouvel chose the desert rose as the layout for the Qatar National Museum building because it symbolizes the “silent and eternal dimension, but also the spirit of modernity and daring that have come along and shaken up what seemed unshakeable”. Here we can ask ourselves why he opted to use a naturally occurring sediment in the desert instead of a camel or an oryx that is indigenous to Qatar, as a symbol of the Qatari culture. The silence and eternal factor that pertains to the desert rose acts as a stark contrast to the reality of Qatari life, a rambunctious and busy city life that is colored with skyscrapers. In addition, the structural make-up of the desert rose, rising from the ground, reasserts a stable, timeless, and sentimental factor that an indigenous animal cannot evoke. 

I want to focus on the second part of his claim about the spirit of modernity that shook the traditional Qatari paradigm. We know that Nouvel intended to design the museum to signify the contrast between heritage and modernity that comes with the Qatari culture. Specifically, he asserts that “in the aftermath of the Second World War, was the amazing discovery of oil, followed twenty years later by the discovery of another treasure: gas. The desert peninsula of Qatar and its people suddenly saw enormous, dazzling change and the country turned into a real crossroads, alluring and open, and attracting visitors from far and wide.”, we can see that Nouvel correlates the modernity shook the seemingly silent and eternal desert with the discovery of oil and gas. Here we need to look at the important, symbolic role of oil and gas in Qatari culture. It signifies Qatar’s economic power because it gave Qatar the tools for prosperity. Much like “After Oil”, research published about the transitions of fossil fuels, postulates that the discovery of oil has allowed for the modernization of society and its dimension is dependent on the continuous use of oil. 

The desert rose structure reminds us of our continuous dependency on oil, and in a way, could be looked at as an appreciative monument for it. Without it, Qatar would not enjoy the economic prosperity that Nouvel mentioned. But this petro-fuelled progress comes at a cost: the dissolution of not only ecological and biological species but also our own culture and heritage, an eco-bio-cultural extinction event. So, how could a structure that appreciates a petro-fuelled society act as a heritage symbol? The modern and cultural symbolism of the museum does not serve as a contrast, but in reality, a contradiction. The presence of oil hinders the timelessness aspect of the structure as oil is becoming scarcer by the day and overtakes the historical culture and dissolves it into a culture that is dependant on energy. Another contradiction with the structure of the museum arises: its claim to be “extremely energy efficient”, having received  a four-star sustainability rating from the Global Sustainability Assessment System. The disks act as a barrier from the sun, reducing the need to use any extra cooling mechanisms. But being sustainable does not stop the reinforcement of the usage of energy. So what happens when oil stops becoming sustainable? does the desert rose lose its symbolic meaning in Qatar’s contemporary context?

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