Louvre Abu Dhabi
— — a museum that lets the sun draw on its own floor.
Not only on a wall.
“A museum-city under a single perforated dome, designed by Jean Nouvel and opened in November 2017. Fifty-five low white buildings arranged like a small Arab medina, half-flooded by the Gulf, walked between in shade. The dome filters daylight through eight layered geometric screens; the result on the plaza below is the architect's named effect, a rain of light. The sea comes up to the walls. — from the studio
Louvre Abu Dhabi, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Louvre Abu Dhabi sits on the western edge of Saadiyat Island, part of the emirate's planned Saadiyat Cultural District. Designed by the French architect Jean Nouvel and opened on 11 November 2017, the museum is the result of a thirty-year intergovernmental agreement between the United Arab Emirates and France that licenses the Louvre name through 2037. The building covers about 24,000 square metres of galleries beneath a 180-metre-wide steel dome, surrounded by the waters of the Persian Gulf. It is the first universal-survey museum in the Arab world.
The dome is the architectural argument: 7,850 stars cut into eight superimposed layers of aluminium and steel, four outer and four inner, offset so that no single ray reaches the floor unbroken. Nouvel calls the resulting pattern a rain of light, after the dappled shade of a date-palm grove. The dome weighs roughly 7,500 tonnes, comparable to the Eiffel Tower, and rests on only four piers hidden inside the museum-city. The effect moves with the sun: sharper at noon, longer and slanted in the late afternoon when most visitors arrive.
The museum opens Tuesday through Sunday, closed Mondays, with extended hours Thursday and Friday until 10 p.m. The permanent galleries are organised chronologically in twelve chapters rather than by region, so a Mesopotamian relief sits in the same room as a Chinese bronze of the same century. Loans rotate from thirteen French partner institutions, including the Louvre, Musée d'Orsay, and Centre Pompidou. Access is by taxi or the Saadiyat Island bus from downtown Abu Dhabi, about 25 minutes from the corniche. The plaza outside the dome is free to walk after sunset.