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Alber Elbaz, the architect of the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar, has been dubbed one of the most fascinating figures of modern times. To understand what made him interesting, it’s worth taking a look back to the early 90s when he was a young architect, a visionary, an outsider – who, when asked to design the new home of the football World Cup for his alma mater, the famous Al Nasr Sports City in Paris, was a bit befuddled.
Elbaz’s father was a civil engineer, like him, and brought up by his mother, his own ‘big sister’, was an architect with a passion for sports as well. At the tender age of six, his family moved to Madrid, where he started to learn to play the guitar and piano. His mother, meanwhile, encouraged him to keep playing piano and was also a jazz and blues singer. He also learned to play the saxophone and studied painting and sculpture, until one day, they decided to take a break from their busy schedule and travel for a while.
Albé then met his best friend, a dancer, but they didn’t get along very well, so she moved on. “It was then that I met my first girlfriend, who I’ve been with ever since,” he said.
When they arrived in France, they decided to stay in Paris, and Albé, who had just turned 16, asked his mother for some money to buy some things for the shop in his name. They ended up spending everything. Eventually, his mother managed to convince him to go and study architecture at the prestigious École du Louvre. “I had to go for it and I was proud of it,” he said, noting he had been chosen from hundreds of others.
Elbaz’s father was later killed in an accident while on duty at the military air base where he worked. When his mother got a job in the city’s architecture
