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Architects: Cox Architecture
- Area: 120000 m²
- Year: 2023
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Photographs:Phil Handforth
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Lead Architects: Steve Woodland, Greg Howlett, Amanda Ainslie
Text description provided by the architects. Located in Nizwa, one of the oldest cities in Oman, the Museum is inspired by the extraordinary landscape and geometric profiles of the Al Hajar Mountains and its canyons. The Oman Across Ages Museum is a celebration of the country's rich history, culture, and economic growth over time while offering a compelling insight into Oman's tomorrow. The museum is a cultural and educational landmark for Omanis and visitors alike. The sheer scale of the building as it rises from the desert floor and stretches to the horizon is something to behold.
As a cultural landmark, the museum transports visitors across the nation's 800-million-year history through a series of immersive, high-tech experiences. The building emerges from the landscape as a series of angular, geometric forms that sit in dialogue with the backdrop of the peaks and ridges of the Al Hajar Mountain range. In harmony with the architecture, the exhibition design celebrates Oman's rich heritage, dating from prehistory to the modern day through the latest immersive technologies.
The sheer scale of the building is something to behold. It includes galleries, a library knowledge center, an auditorium, a workplace, artist-in-residence accommodation and studios, conservation workshops, cafés, and social and research spaces. The permanent exhibition space alone is 9,000 square metres and some galleries stretch more than 20 metres high. This gave us the freedom and space, literally and metaphorically, to create a truly dramatic and utterly jaw-dropping visitor experience through installations and displays on a scale that does justice to Oman's rich history.
There were two central forces of inspiration that sat behind our initial ideas, the landscape, and the culture. The Oman landscape is incredibly potent, a raw but beautiful circumstance. In concert with that was the extraordinary history and culture of Oman and its people, the coincidence of this incredible piece of geography and human achievements became central to the design ideation. The Museum is very much about jointly celebrating these. The compositional outcome is a synthesis of a Nations incredible human achievement alongside a compelling landscape. There is an infinite source of inspiration. The flux between the intimate stories of people and the grand stories of their heritage and physical environment. The ideation for the architecture emerged seamlessly from these points of inspiration.
The Al Hajar mountains form this incredible jagged silhouette as the immediate neighbor embraces the building. The composition is abstracted from those extraordinary forms and translated into this unique structure. The building form grows up and out of the earth from the south, rising into its mountain peak at the northern end. The building itself is an embedded part of the storytelling. It's not just an enclosure, but a storytelling vehicle itself. In this way, the core narratives of the museum are echoed and reinforced by the building itself. A successful museum is about an ensemble of storytelling, building, exhibition, and experiential qualities coming together. It is this complete ensemble that gives the museum its personality and potency.
The building seeks to offer this broad gesture of welcome and generosity of arrival which is an open invitation to join the museum. This invitation leads seamlessly into the Welcome Hall, which offers panoramic views of the surrounding mountains. This sets up carefully curated journeys. The journeys are largely intuitive and offer a progression of narratives from pre-history to the current day. The journeys are thus orchestrated but still retain a sense of spontaneity and variety. There is the ability to choose the pace and degree of forensic undertaking. Most critically, there is a clear progression from openness to immersion.
The Oman Across Ages Museum constitutes a new paradigm in the museum experience. Its design uses the full array of architecture's potential for expression and communication, including scale, geometry, form, light, and vistas both as purely expressive devices, and to offer a wide range of possibilities for installations, displays, and performances across its varied spaces.
