This initially little-published project was developed in 2007 for the new district of the Qatari capital, “City of Education,” where several American and European university campuses have now appeared. The building was ordered by the Qatar Educational Foundation, and two more OMA buildings were to appear nearby: the headquarters of the foundation and the building of the RAND Policy Institute.
The crisis interfered with the implementation of these plans, but now the library project is being talked about again. From the "Central Library of the Qatar Foundation" it turned into a National Library, which significantly raised its rank.
It is planned to collect about 1 million books in the new library (some of them will come from the current national book depository, which opened 50 years ago), install 300 public computers there, and create an eHub - a center for remote access to archives of electronic books and documents.
The Koolhaas building will be erected in the "City of Education" as planned, although initially, in the early 2000s, an honorable place on the Doha waterfront was chosen for the National Library. Then its building was designed by Arata Isozaki, who proposed a variation in the spirit of his early work: an inverted pyramid on two huge supports. But the project, like many other "star" works for Qatar at that time, remained on paper.
