Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art
Repurposed school wrapped in a scaffolding-style screen facade, built as a temporary home that became permanent.
This guide to Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha starts with the scaffolding-clad facade that architect Jean-François Bodin wrapped around a converted school in Education City, meant only as a temporary home while a permanent Mathaf was designed elsewhere. It follows that stopgap building from its December 2010 opening to today, and the collection inside it, begun in the early 1990s by Sheikh Hassan bin Mohamed bin Ali Al Thani decades before Doha talked about museums at all. Stand on the entrance terrace and look up at the scaffolding skin engineered to look deliberately unfinished.
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