som

SOM Partner Ross Wimer’s design for the Qatar Science Centre overturns the conventional low, horizontal museum building, proposing instead an iconic, 820-foot-tall structure that contains exhibits about science and technology, while itself acting as a functional scientific instrument on display. The museum’s 300,000 square feet of program—including galleries, administrative offices, classrooms, labs, a 200-seat auditorium, and a 200-seat IMAX theater—are housed in individual 11,000-square-foot, clear-span volumes, topped by gardens and suspended within a cylindrical, structural steel cage. Assembled from prefabricated, triangular facets, the cage forms a diagonal lattice—or diagrid—which is extremely efficient, lightweight, and strong. Elevators, egress stairs, and mechanical rooms are housed in twin concrete core elements on the east and west sides of the steel structure. The exhibition halls and gardens are connected by a cascading series of open stairs and escalators.

A glass curtain wall sheathes the entire tower, forming air-circulation plenums on the north and south sides. The north plenum distributes cool, dehumidified air collected by underground tubes from offshore to the tower’s galleries and sky gardens. The south plenum acts as a solar chimney, conducting superheated air collected from a 41,000-square-meter glass canopy at the tower’s base to the top of the building, where the exhausted air drives a turbine to generate electricity for the museum.

The rooftop gardens function as exhibit platforms. One houses an open windfarm powered by breezes moving through the structure; another reveals a massive, spherical steel pendulum suspended by cables from the structure above, similar to Foucault’s pendulum familiar from traditional science museums. Instead of describing the rotation of the earth, however, this sphere acts as a tuned mass damper, keeping the tall, slender building from swaying in the wind. As high velocity air exerts force against the top of the tower, the 16-foot-diameter sphere’s inherent inertia exerts an opposite force, steadying the top of the building.

The building’s height allows the tower to function as a type of sundial. On the northern half of the site, the landscape is inscribed with a solar path diagram. As the sun arcs overhead, the tower’s shadow follows a distinct path corresponding to the time of day and year. For every hour of the day, a specific curve—known as the analemma—is etched into the landscape, allowing visitors to note the hour, day, and month based on where the tower’s shadow falls on that curve. From the sky garden at the top of the tower, visitors have an ideal vantage point of the analemma garden on the ground below; they can also observe the solar chimney’s giant rotor suspended in the diagrid directly above, spinning in the current of superheated air rushing out of the top of the building.