Across Ages Museum, Nizwa // Oman
15 april
Project: Across Ages Museum, Nizwa // Oman
Architect: COX Architecture // Australia
Fabricator + Installer: Dubai Metal Industries, Thiruvananthapuram // India
Façade System: Tray panels special design
Year of Construction: 2023
Product: ALUCOBOND® PLUS premium anodised Copper + PANELOX® Copper
Photos: Phillip Handforth
Traces in stone
In this lonely Omani setting, culture rises from the desert rock bothfiguratively and architecturally. Designed by Cox Architecture, theOman Across Ages Museum rises up out of the surrounding stonedesert like a sharp-edged crag. The origins of the country's cultural,political and religious heritage are rooted here, just a fewkilometres south of the oasis city of Nizwa and on the southernfoothills of the Hajar Mountain range. So, it makes perfect senseto locate a museum exhibiting the country's culture and historyfrom the Stone Age to the future here in the desert, away from themajor coastal cities, and for the immediate landscape to inspirethe architecture.The 66,591 m² building is a steel structure; its roof is configuredas a truss system and rhomboid diagrid. This offers the structuregreat stability and at the same time does more with less material.It also allows the building to cantilever outwards with apparentease and boldness, to slant and distort. In the interior, expansivecolumn-free spaces span up to hundred metres. Some of thesespaces soar thirty metres upwards. The high ceilings, distinctivelight sources and special perspectives create an atmosphere ofsanctity: highly polished, white natural stone floors, a portal madeof slender, taut supports, skylights shimmering brightly in the sunhigh up in the roof space, the mighty roof sloping earthwards,heavy and low, to form a cavern below, and the endless expanseof desert stretching out beyond the high panoramic windows.Full of pathos, this building unfolds as a result of the impressivearchitecture and the timeless landscape, and shelters the entireexhibition. Despite its height, the structure appears, at least froma distance, to be a flat building crouching down in its own shade,its white natural stone blending into the flat land; its open-airspaces tracing grand, geometric outlines in sand and stone.Its northern tip, however, stretches out like a jagged, tall and angularlandmark towards Nizwa. The huge façade, which tilts towardsthe road and over the body of water stretching out in frontof it, is covered with copper-coloured ALUCOBOND® tray panels.Sunlight is reflected in the ALUCOBOND® and water facing it.The course of the sun and the wind, which causes ripples on thesurface of the water, keep light reflections in motion, changing thematerial’s impact. In the evening, when the setting sunlight bathesthe desert in fiery colours, the copper surface begins to gleam,burnished and elegant.Traces in stone