Friday · September · 18 · 2026
“Time is money.”
— Benjamin Franklin
Sun & daylight
The sun rises at 05:22 and sets at 17:37 in Doha today, giving 12h 14m of daylight. Solar noon is at 11:29.
05:22
Sunrise
11:29
Noon
17:37
Sunset
Midnight
23:29
Sunrise
05:22
Solar noon
11:29
Sunset
17:37
Solar midnight
23:29
Daylight
12h 14m
Daylight runs about 13h 42m around the June solstice and 10h 33m around the December solstice.
Daylight saving time
Doha does not observe daylight saving time. Clocks stay on UTC+3 all year, so the local time never shifts with the seasons.
Public holidays
Qatar has no public holidays in September 2026.
Architecture
Doha commissioned most of its civic architecture inside twenty years, on land reclaimed from the bay or cleared next to it. Nearly every building here answers the same question of what a specifically Gulf modernism looks like.
Completed 2021
Ibrahim M. Jaidah
A football stadium south of the city, and the one World Cup venue designed by a Qatari architect. Jaidah took the gahfiya, the woven cap worn under a headdress across the Gulf, and built its pattern as the structural screen of a circular bowl, so the openwork that shades the concourse is also the elevation. The upper tier was built to be dismantled after the tournament. Every other stadium in that programme imported its form; this one is a piece of clothing at stadium scale.
Completed 2019
Jean Nouvel
The national museum, wrapped around the restored palace of Sheikh Abdullah bin Jassim Al Thani. Nouvel took the desert rose, the flat crystal discs that form in salt basins, and built it as five hundred and thirty-nine interlocking discs of fibre-reinforced concrete, each a different diameter and curvature. The galleries are the spaces left between them, so there are almost no vertical walls to hang work on. The old palace stands at the centre of the courtyard the whole structure is arranged around.
Completed 2018
Rem Koolhaas
A single room holding a national, public and university library at once. Koolhaas lifted two edges of a flat square into terraces, so the shelving is the topography and every book in the open collection is visible from the floor. The manuscripts sit six metres down in the middle, in a sunken travertine excavation. Nothing is hidden in a stack, which makes it an argument that a library should show its holdings rather than store them.
Completed 2012
Jean Nouvel
A cylindrical office tower in the West Bay financial district. Nouvel covered it in a layered aluminium screen of butterfly elements at four scales, a mashrabiya enlarged to the size of a building, and varied the density face by face: lightest on the north, densest east and west where the sun is low. Inside, a concrete diagrid carries the load so the perimeter is free. The screen is a climate device that also gives the tower its only elevation.
Completed 2008
I. M. Pei
A museum on an island built for it, sixty metres off the Corniche so nothing could later crowd it. Pei, in his nineties and new to the subject, toured the Islamic world for two years and settled on the ablution fountain of the Ibn Tulun mosque in Cairo, taking its stacked cubes and octagon as his geometry. Limestone blocks step back as they rise to a domed atrium lit from a single oculus. He wanted a building that changes with the sun rather than resists it.