卡塔尔国家图书馆“宇宙幕帘”丨卡塔尔多哈丨OMA,Inside Outside

Cosmic Curtain,

Qatar National Library, Doha

Place

: Doha, Qatar

Client

: OMA/Qatar Foundation

Architect

: OMA

Scope of Work

: Creating an Auditorium in the main hall

Date

: 2012 - 2018

Size

: 700 m2 of fabric

The National library in Doha, Qatar, is designed by OMA as a large open space intersected by a bridge. Within the bridge an auditorium is created by folding the surface to create the stairs/seats for the audience. Inside Outside designed a track configuration, parallel to these stairs and created a curtain that envelopes and closes off this void. This gigantic ‘Cosmic Curtain’, with its 700 m2 of fabric, expands the concept of a curtain, turning it into a fundamental piece of the interior architecture.

Custom-made for this prestigious new building, the curtain has to satisfy high technical and aesthetic demands.

The big challenge of this projects was to weave a fabric that is flexible enough to be pulled along horizontal and diagonal rails. Together with the TextielLab in Tilburg we explored the technical possibilities. The curtain needed to look good and move easily in every direction, including a slanted section along the stairways.

A loose weave with a firm and smooth weft letting the fibres slide vertically across each other for the necessary flexibility. Circles woven into the fabric keep the loose material together without restricting the supple fall of the curtain. To give the curtain extra stability, ribs in a rythm of 25 cm, are woven in the fabric.

In this weave the yarn must tick many boxes: shiny, smooth, strong, durable, colourfast, non-shrinking, crease-resistant and fire retardant. We choose a viscose raffia with a deep metallic sheen, a crinkly texture and audible rustle.

Along the inside of the curtain the colours shift from deep black to dark blue, with planets and stars in different shades of silver. The outside of the curtain reveals the same damask pattern, but variations in the weft mean that the fabric on this side is almost completely made up of whites in shiny and matt yarn. Light on the outside, dark on the inside: the 2 sides are as different as night and day.

The curtain creates an intimate inner world with a design that is inspired by the desert night. Spheres of different sizes represent heavenly bodies. The graphic lines surrounding them are a reference to the astrolabes.The Museum of Islamic Art in Doha has a beautiful collection of astrolabes that in-spired our design. The astrolabe was highly developed in the Islamic world by 800 and was introduced to Europe from Islamic Spain (al-Andalus) in the early 12th century. Astrolabes are the inclime¬ters used to calculate the positions of planets and stars. This is done by drawing the sky on the face of the astrolabe and marking it so that positions in the sky are easy to find.

NUMBERS

Of the 96 panels in total, 78 feature a unique design. The panels measure 1.7 metres high, with a width varying between 3 and 5,5 metres. Combined, the panels create a curtain of 100 metres long and between 4,9 metres and 6,4 metres high.

It took two months of weaving – six days a week – to complete.

Team Inside Outside

: Petra Blaisse with Marieke van den Heuvel, Peter Niessen, Carmen Buijtenhuis and Aura Melis

In cooperation with TextielMuseum/TextielLab Tilburg