Louvre Abu Dhabi

The Louvre Abu Dhabi is an art and civilization museum, located in Abu Dhabi, UAE. The museum was established on November 8th, 2017. It is part of a thirty-year agreement between the city of Abu Dhabi and the French government. The museum is located on the Saadiyat Island Cultural District, making it the largest art museum in the Arabian Peninsula. Artwork from around the world is showcased at the museum, with particular focus placed upon bridging the gap between Eastern and Western art.

Louvre Abu Dhabi’s displays and its new approach to the history of civilization. It is dedicated to focusing on moments of cultural exchange and encounter rather than crisis and conflict, the museum sets out to explore our common humanity rather than the things that divide us through the display of similar or thematically linked objects from disparate cultures and civilizations.[2]

By asking three random visitors of the Louvre Abu Dhabi, and by asking them about the feeling they experienced with the place, one of the visitors told me “it’s a strange feeling, you can feel the light connecting you to the outer space and let you feel free and in a special way your soul gets purified”. Two other visitors told me the same comment “It’s a building that blends with surrounding in a unique harmony”.

ABOUT THE ARCHITECT and the idea behind the project

Louvre Abu Dhabi designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Jean Nouvel. Its first key principle highlights the museum structure as a metaphor of the traditional Arabic souk, with small shaded passages. The second key principle is the protection of this museum, where the pedestrian areas and the nested artworks are roofed by a large dome.[1]

The Louvre Abu Dhabi is a classical art museum, and it had been planned as a central feature of the cultural district of Saadiyat Island. Louvre Abu Dhabi is consisting of 22,500m² of gallery space and supporting programs, the museum buildings are arranged in a micro-city floating on the sea, shaded by an iconic shallow dome.[2]

The Shallow dome plays an inimitable role with its peerless location at the heart of the design; as the dome structure implements environmental, aesthetic, and structural functions. [3]

From an environmental perspective, it provides shade and cooler temperatures to the outdoor public spaces that connecting the different divisions of the museum village. Aesthetically, it functions as an external open-air canopy, filtering the natural light of the sun and creating a dramatic and constantly transforming lighting effect beneath the dome.  [4]

The dome design and structure are an impressive collaboration of architecture, science, and construction to grant a special effect that architects describe as a “rain of light”.

Blurring art and engineering, the dome is perforated to create an internal effect using the light and affects human feelings with that sensational effect.

Creating the museum’s rain of light effect was far from easy. The Dome’s steel structural core is covered with eight perforated layers of cladding – four on top and four underneath. These layers are formed from 7,850 star-shaped aluminum and stainless steel elements, measuring between 6 and 40 feet wide each, and weighing up to 1.3 tonnes. The effect is a seemingly random geometric arrangement. However, the pattern – the result of years of testing including a full-size mockup placed on the site – is carefully calibrated to modulate the light and temperature conditions of the internal space.[5]