Doha, Qatar’s capital, was altered fast when the country’s massive oil and gas reserves were discovered in the mid-20th century. It’s now a cosmopolitan metropolis with soaring skyscrapers and Gulliver-sized institutions designed by starchitects like I. M. Pei, Jean Nouvel, Arata Isozaki, and Rem Koolhaas. It was once a village on the edge of the desert known for pearl fishing and trading. There are notable sculptures by Richard Serra, Louise Bourgeois, Urs Fischer, Damien Hirst, César, and Eduardo Chillida displayed at several of their sites, as well as the airport, parks, and other publicly accessible places.
Take, for example, Hamad International Airport, which serves over 50 million passengers each year. It’s jam-packed with sculptures of all kinds—basically a museum that caters to both intellectual adults and rowdy kids. The curatorial approach is shown by Urs Fischer’s Lamp Bear (2005/06), which is positioned where all the concourses intersect, just steps from duty-free shopping. Walking past this 23-foot-tall, 20-ton work, which is elevated on a circular pedestal custom-designed by the artist for its current site, it’s tough not to smile.
Tom Otterness developed an eight-part playground that runs the length of one concourse. Parents must be grateful that their youngsters can tyre themselves out climbing all over the spread-out elements or sliding down one of the slides before boarding flights home. A part of this amusement park along the Hudson River in New York, on West 43rd Street, attracts much fewer boys and girls. Tom Otterness was delighted to hear children shouting while playing on his bronze behemoths in Doha one evening around midnight.
