Doha Tower

This guide to Doha Tower follows a structural puzzle architect Jean Nouvel set for his engineers: a forty-six-story cylinder with no central concrete core. It traces how they answered with a diagrid of crossing columns pushed out to the tower's skin, echoing an earlier tower Nouvel had built in Barcelona. From there it turns to the mashrabiya, the wooden lattice pattern from old Doha houses that Nouvel's team scaled up and cast in aluminum around the glass.