The National Library, Minsk, Belarus
The National Library of Belarus, situated in the nation’s capital of Minsk, is the official copyright library in the Republic of Belarus. The primary structure, finished in January 2006, has an unusual shape called a rhombicuboctahedron, an Archimedean solid with eight triangular and eighteen square sides. The 22-story structure, which contains a meeting room with 500 seats, was created by architects Mihail Vinogradov and Viktor Kramarenko. It has a capacity for 2,000 readers. Integrate with the façade; there are 4646 RGB color-changing LED fixtures, 1349 controllers, 54 splitters, a channel splitter, a converter, and a computer that directs the light shows with the aid of custom-designed software.
National Museum of Qatar
The new museum, devoted to Qatar’s history, was designed to symbolize the fluidity and eternal dimension of the desert. The team created a 350-meter-long structure with a succession of massive, inward-curving disks, using the desert rose as inspiration. The disks cut through one another to create a structure formed of intricate geometrical gaps. High-performance glass fiber-reinforced concrete serves as the building’s exterior skin and is the same sand color inside and out. With 11 galleries, the museum offers a singular experience for viewing art and moving between exhibition rooms. The museum’s permanent exhibitions will concentrate on Qatar’s environmental, cultural, and political history.