Louvre Abu Dhabi is the first museum to open on the artificial island of Saadiyat in the capital of the UAE. It seemed that the global economic crisis of 2008 put an end to ambitious plans to create there a whole "bouquet" of large-scale cultural institutions in no less large-scale buildings, but the Louvre of Jean Nouvel was nevertheless implemented, and in the future, the Guggenheim-Abu Dhabi Frank Museum will open its doors Gehry and the Sheikh Zayed Norman Foster National Museum. Recall that this is the second branch of the Louvre, the first opened in Lance in the north of France, in the SANAA building.
Louvre Abu Dhabi is presented by its creators as the first “universal” museum in the Arab world; half of his exposition will be works from the collections of 13 French museums, half - from his own actively collected collection (and also
there will be Leonardo da Vinci's Savior of the World, recently auctioned for a record $ 450 million).
The museum building is surrounded by water; the landscape of the Emirates - the plane of the earth and the sea under the sky - is reflected in the structure of the structure, the "archipelago", covered with a huge openwork metal dome. A “museum city” was created under it: laconic white buildings, like the dome, refer to the traditions of Arab architecture. There are 55 of them in total, 26 of them have permanent exhibition halls. The walls of this "medina" are made of ultra-efficient fiber-reinforced concrete.
The diameter of the dome (it was designed by Waagner Biro Stahlbau together with the Nouvel bureau) is 180 m, the circumference is more than half a kilometer, the thickness is seven meters; the highest point is 36 m above ground level. It consists of 7850 "stars" of various sizes and shapes, the largest of which is 13 m in diameter and weighs 1.3 tons. The permeability of the dome creates a "rain of light" effect under it, which changes depending on the time of day. At night, the dome glows from the inside. It consists of eight layers - four outer, stainless steel, and four inner, aluminum. Between them is a steel frame, five meters high, of 10,000 parts assembled in 85 large elements with an average weight of 50 tons. The dome with a total weight of 7,500 tons (almost like the Eiffel Tower) rests on four supports with a span of 110 meters.
The total area of the museum is 97,000 m2; of which 6400 m2 are occupied by a permanent exhibition, 2000 m2 - by space for temporary exhibitions, a children's museum covers 200 m2, an auditorium for 250 seats - 420 m2. The Louvre Abu Dhabi also has a storehouse, restoration workshops, an administration building, a museum store, a restaurant, cafes and public spaces.
In the interiors, the floors are paved with stone modules in bronze "frames"; the choice of the stone was conditioned by the time of creation of the exhibits on display in the hall. The ceilings are made of 25,000 glass panels of 18 types. Jean Nouvel designed a set of furniture specially for the museum, produced by Poltrona Frau.
The facade of one of the outer buildings is covered with a work by Jenny Holzer: in it she combined three texts from different eras and cultures, a cuneiform tablet with a creation myth in Sumerian and Akkadian - as, among other things, one of the earliest examples of translation, three excerpts from Mukaddima, a work the Arab historian Ibn Khaldun in 1377 (the original scroll was taken), and Montaigne's "Experiments" (the author's manuscript of 1588 was used).
Thanks to efficient heating, ventilation, air conditioning systems, lamps and mixers, as well as protection against overheating with a dome and the use of natural light, incl. through its openwork openings, the building consumes 27% less energy and the same amount of water than a similar one of the same parameters. The museum is protected from storms by piles driven into the seabed, breakwaters, etc.
At the end of December, the first temporary exhibition, From Louvre to Another: Opening a Museum for All, opened in the Louvre Abu Dhabi: it tells about the existence of the Louvre as a cultural center and, ultimately, a museum in the 18th century.
