The museum was conceived as a national flagship development intended to rival leading museums around the world. Set on a 300 000 square metre site and offering a gross floor area of 116 500 square metres, the building’s form was designed to echo the dramatic Al Hajar mountain range and the rugged desert landscape that surrounds it.

Delivering a structure of this scale and ambition created an opportunity to apply innovative engineering solutions to a site that presented multiple environmental and technical complexities. These challenges included its position within a dry riverbed susceptible to flash flooding, remote location two hours from Muscat and the requirement for column free galleries capable of supporting extensive exhibition and heavy cladding loads.

Additionally, the project brought the chance to integrate some of the world’s largest glazed wall panels and to design high performance building services capable of maintaining strict environmental conditions necessary for the preservation of delicate historical artefacts in a harsh, dusty and hot climate.