Qatar Museums has announced that the Chile-based practice, ELEMENTAL, has won the Art Mill International Design Competition, a global search to find an outstanding team to design one of the world’s leading cultural centres.
ELEMENTAL was selected by an international jury, from a list of 26 strong competitors, based on their strategies for the site and its links to the city. ELEMENTAL’s concept design for the historic waterfront site in the centre of Doha took as its inspiration the rhythmic monumental grain silos that are the industrial legacy of the original Flour Mills on the site, which have produced bread for Qatar since the 1980s.
Close to key landmarks, including the Corniche and Jean Nouvel’s forthcoming National Museum of Qatar, the Art Mill will have an extraordinary civic presence. The reinvention of the existing site as a cultural space reflects the wider urban and civic development of Doha.
It will be designed to connect some of the country’s most cherished cultural institutions, including the Museum of Islamic Art, QM Gallery Al Riwaq and the forthcoming National Museum of Qatar.
The concept design was praised by the international jury as ‘a serene artwork, where the structure is the architecture’.
The team’s environmental strategy was also praised for its understanding of the local climate. ELEMENTAL is led by Alejandro Aravena, the 2016 Pritzker Prize Laureate, and supported by climate engineers, Transsolar; structural engineers, Schlaich Bergermann; and global design consultants, Stantec.
Gifted with one of the most spectacular and historic sites in the centre of Doha, the Art Mill will be pre-eminent in Doha’s waterfront ensemble of institutions dedicated to art and is expected to become one of the world’s leading cultural centres.
