By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF


“Contemporary architects tend to impose modernity on something. … A lasting architecture has to have roots.”


DOHA, Qatar - I can’t seem to get the Museum of Islamic Art out of my mind. There’s nothing revolutionary about the building. But its clean, chiseled forms have a tranquillity that distinguishes it in an age that often seems trapped somewhere between gimmickry and a cloying nostalgia.

Part of the allure may have to do with I.M.Pei, the museum’s architect. Mr.Pei reached the height of his popularity decades ago with projects like the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Louvre pyramid in Paris. Since then he has been an enigmatic figure. His best work has admirers, but it has largely been ignored within architecture’s intellectual circles. Now, at 91 and near the end of a long career, Mr.Pei seems to be enjoying a revival.

The museum is also notable for its place within a broader effort to reshape the region’s cultural identity. The myriad largescale civic projects, from a Guggenheim museum planned for Abu Dhabi to Education City in Doha, are often dismissed in Western circles as superficial fantasies.

As the first to reach completion, the Museum of Islamic Art is proof that the boom is not a mirage. The building’s austere, almost primitive forms and the dazzling collections it houses underscore the seriousness of the country’s cultural ambition.

Perhaps even more compelling, the design is rooted in an optimistic worldview - one at odds with the schism between cosmopolitan modernity and backward fundamentalism that has come to define the last few decades in the Middle East. It embodies the ideal that the past and the present can co-exist harmoniously.

To Mr.Pei, all serious architecture is found somewhere between the extremes of an overly sentimental view of the past and a form of historical amnesia.

“Contemporary architects tend to impose modernity on something,”he said in an interview.“There is a certain concern for history but it’s not very deep. I understand that time has changed, we have evolved. But I don’t want to forget the beginning. A lasting architecture has to have roots.”

His work has never lost its aura of measured idealism. It reached its highest expression in the National Gallery of Art’s East Building, a composition of angular stone forms completed in 1978 that is the most visible emblem of modern Washington.

Since that popular triumph, Mr.Pei has often seemed to take the kind of leisurely approach to design that other architects, no matter how well established, can only dream of. When first approached in 1983 to take part in a competition to design the addition to the Louvre, he refused. President Francois Mitterrand nevertheless hired him. Mr.Pei then asked him if he could take several months to study French history.

He spent months traveling across Europe and North Africa before beginning work on the final design of the glass pyramids.

Such an attitude runs counter to the everaccelerating pace of the global age - not to mention our obsession with novelty. Mr.Pei, by contrast, imagines history as a smooth continuous process - a view that is deftly embodied by the Islamic Museum, whose clean abstract surfaces are an echo of both high Modernism and ancient Islamic architecture. Mr.Pei’s aim was to integrate the values of that earlier era into today’s culture - to capture, as he put it, the“essence of Islamic architecture.”

Mr.Pei located his museum on a small man-made island, approachable from a short bridge. The bridge, flanked by rows of tall palm trees, is set diagonally to the entry, which makes the stacked geometric forms appear more angular and the contrast between light and shadow more extreme.

His museum reminds us that building a culture, as much as a political or social agenda, can be an act of healing. Like all great art, it requires forging seemingly conflicting values into a common whole.