"We didn't want to do a building, we wanted to create a neighborhood,” said Hala Wardé of the Louvre Abu Dhabi, which opened its doors to press today in anticipation of its official opening on November 11. “Every room of this museum was going to become a building, and we designed it as a sequence, for a promenade.” Wardé, a longtime collaborator of the Paris-based Pritzker Prize laureate Jean Nouvel and project architect of the Louvre Abu Dhabi, recalled the moment during construction that had everyone holding their breath; “When we removed all the temporary structure from the dome, that was tense—luckily, there were no surprises.”
That 590-foot-wide dome is the signature feature of Nouvel’s most anticipated project to date. Supported by only four hidden, permanent piers, each 360 feet apart, the dome appears to float above the 55 white buildings beneath it, 23 of them galleries. The dome’s complex pattern is the result of a highly studied geometric design, repeated at various sizes and angles in eight superimposed layers, including four outer layers in steel.
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