Al Wahda Arches at the beginning of the Lusail Expressway in Onaiza

The Al Wahda Arches (also called 5/6 Arch, Qatar Arch, Gateway Arch) is a monumental pair of 20° inclined

steel Steel is an alloy of iron and carbon that demonstrates improved mechanical properties compared to the pure form of iron. Due to steel's high Young's modulus, elastic modulus, Yield (engineering), yield strength, Fracture, fracture strength a ...

arches An arch is a curved vertical structure span (engineering), spanning an open space underneath it. Arches may support the load above them, or they may perform a purely decorative role. As a decorative element, the arch dates back to the 4th mill ...

, spanning the "5/6 interchange" of the Lusail expressway,

Qatar Qatar, officially the State of Qatar, is a country in West Asia. It occupies the Geography of Qatar, Qatar Peninsula on the northeastern coast of the Arabian Peninsula in the Middle East; it shares Qatar–Saudi Arabia border, its sole land b ...

which connects West Bay with Lusail City. It is the tallest monument in the country and has received a 2020 International Design Award and 2018 ENR Global Best Project award. Intended to be viewed while in motion as an "immersive public artwork", the arches are connected to each other by a cable net – a reference to Qatar's

pearl diving Pearl hunting, also known as pearl fishing or pearling, is the activity of recovering or attempting to recover pearls from wild Mollusca, molluscs, usually oysters or mussels, in the sea or freshwater. Pearl hunting was prevalent in India and Jap ...

heritage. The structure itself consists of 54 large steel pieces, weighing over 9,000 tons, while the base of the arches are clad in Limra Limestone from Turkey. The monument, suspended viewing platform, and associated visitor centre were commissioned by Ashghal (the public works authority), designed by German architect Erik Behrens for

AECOM AECOM (, ; formerly AECOM Technology Corporation; stylised A''Ξ''COM) is an American multinational infrastructure consulting firm headquartered in Dallas, Texas. The company's official name from 1990–2015 was AECOM Technology Corporation, ...

, engineering by Maffeis Engineering and constructed by Eversendai – with an intended completion date of 2016. At a cost of $74m, construction began in December 2013 and after partial completion was inaugurated along with the expressway for National Day celebrations in December 2017. Due to construction occurring during the 2017 Qatar blockade the arches have taken on a local cultural significance of "resilience", and are now known as the 5/6 Arches (referring to 5 June when the diplomatic crisis began) along with "5/6 interchange" and the neighbouring "5/6 park". The construction expressway interchange and Arches replaced the "Rainbow (Arch) roundabout" which used to stand on the site. In 2018 Ashghal and Qatar Post issued a set of commemorative stamps featuring the arches which integrated with an associated

augmented reality Augmented reality (AR), also known as mixed reality (MR), is a technology that overlays real-time 3D computer graphics, 3D-rendered computer graphics onto a portion of the real world through a display, such as a handheld device or head-mounted ...

phone application.

References

{{reflist 2020 in Qatar