Key city sites host artistic interventions to foster creativity

The city of Doha has hosted the inaugural Art Basel Qatar, which unfolded across key heritage sites such as Company House and Bin Jelmood House, alongside the wider cultural district including M7 Cultural Forum. Tenderstream member John McAslan + Partners has played a significant role in shaping these environments, contributing to the restoration and design of projects that support Doha’s evolving cultural identity. The event brought together leading international galleries, artists and cultural figures within Msheireb Downtown Doha. Various interventions demonstrated how thoughtfully designed spaces can support dynamic cultural programming that foster inclusivity, creativity and exchange.

The architecture of the M7 arts hub, completed in 2021, combines Qatari urban and domestic precedents with Modernist design to create an open environment for Qatari and international artists, performers, and the public. The building’s interior suggests a contemporary version of a traditional majilis, a place hosting political, cultural or social assemblies. Its key feature is a processional staircase rising in an atrium capped with a vast skylight, which casts geometric shadows into the heart of the building. M7 bookends the Msheireb’s showpiece Al Bahara Square, with the John McAslan + Partners-designed Mandarin Oriental Hotel at its other end.

The also firm worked with Buro Happold and exhibition designers Ralph Appelbaum to transform four historic courtyard houses dating back to the early 20th century into the Msheireb Museums. With a mixture of restoration, remodelling, extension, and new state-of-the-art environmental systems and museological narratives, the buildings remain traditional in form and materials but are of international museum standard. Opening in 2018, each museum explains the history of a key aspect of Qatar’s early and contemporary development, including the slave trade, the discovery of oil, traditional domestic life, and the transformation of Doha. 

Lucy Nordberg
Tenderstream Head of Research

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