From Narita via Kansai Airport by Qatar Airline I arrived atDoha, the capital of Qatar early in the morning of 29th. The purpose of my visit is to participate in the ‘Global Redesign Summit’
After taking a short rest at the hotel, I headed to the Museum of Islamic Art (資料１，２）I have learned that many pieces of art objects in exhibition were purchased for this museum and the total cost amounted up to 300 million yen.
The Museum was designed byleoh Ming Pei, broadly known as one of the masters of architecture; the museum opened in 2008. He is 93 years old now, meaning that he was nearly 90 at the time he accepted this work, which is quite extraordinary. He visited many places to learn about the culture of Islam.
The museum exhibits various arts from various ages in Islamic nations and region so you will never get bored by the exhibition. Islamic patterns, as you know, are very sophisticated and geometric. I wonder how they make those patterns. Such delicate complex crafts make you humbly aware of the great potentials of human talents but at the same time makes you fear the possibility of great harms in the future that can be done by the very same humans.
Next morning, I visited the Qatar Foundation(Ref.1) and exchanged views with the Vice President of Research and Science for one hour, and visited Cornell University ‘Qatar campus’ (Ref.1) located within the premise. Quite a number of young scientists from all over the world were conducting research in this great facility (opened in 2004).
I was looking forward to directly seeing this place because I was pretty aware of the fact that Qatar was very devoted to enhancing education and research through this foundation. Merely less than half of the plans were accomplished, but I had a gut feeling that this visit was very worthwhile.
It made me very proud to know that the overall design of this campus was done by Mr. Arata Isozaki (Ref.1). He also designed several architectures including this Cornell Qatar campus (the hall is round shaped which allows much better acoustincs? as you can see in the top photos).