This has been a big buzz inside the Guggenheim for a while, as things start to gell we can talk more about this project. The article below was posted today in the New York Times so it's not like I'm spilliing the beans.

The project is astonishing to say the least. As I watch the develpoments on this project from inside the museum I can only guess it will be, by all accounts, the benchmark for Cutural Building projects in both in its scope and scale in which all others will be measured by. The whole project is mind boggeling when you see the master plan presented. 

I'll post some choice photos later when I re-edit this, Plus a sneak preview of a much simmilar article that will be in the Sunday Times this week.

This is by no means a critical review on my behalf. I believe there is much to be debated in terms of the social-political & cultural implications of a building project of this scale.

The New York Times February 1, 2007

Celebrity Architects Reveal a Daring Cultural Xanadu for the Arab World

By HASSAN FATTAH

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates, Jan. 31 — In this land of big ambition and deep pockets, planners on Wednesday unveiled designs for an audacious multibillion-dollar cultural district whose like has never been seen in the Arab world.

The designs presented here in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates and one of the world’s top oil producers, are to be built on an island just off the coast and include three museums designed by the celebrity architects Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel and Tadao Ando, as well as a sprawling, spaceshiplike performing arts center designed by Zaha Hadid.

Mr. Gehry’s building is intended for an Adu Dhabi branch of the Guggenheim Museum featuring contemporary art and Mr. Nouvel’s for a classical museum, possibly an outpost of the Louvre Museum in Paris. Mr. Ando’s is to house a maritime museum reflecting the history of the Arabian gulf.

The project also calls for a national museum and a biennial exhibition space composed of 19 pavilions designed by smaller names and snaking along a canal that cuts through the island. Art schools and an art college are also planned.

In all, the project, known as the Cultural District of Saadiyat Island, would create an exhibition space intended to turn this once-sleepy desert city along the Persian Gulf into an international arts capital and tourist destination. If completed according to plan sometime in the next decade, consultants predict, it could be the world’s largest single arts-and-culture development project in recent memory.

At times astonishing, at times controversial, the district is part of a far broader $27 billion development project on the island that includes hotels, resorts, golf courses and housing that could accommodate 125,000 residents or more.

The museum designs, displayed at an exhibition attended by dignitaries and the United Arab Emirates leadership, are a striking departure from Abu Dhabi’s crumbling 1970s-style concrete buildings and more modern glass-and-steel high-rises. Still, because Saadiyat Island is undeveloped, architects faced the unusual challenge of an aesthetic and contextual tabula rasa.

The daring designs, some teeming with life and color, others more starkly formal, have one aspect in common: it probably would be hard to build them all in one district anywhere else.

“It’s like a clean slate in a country full of resources,” said Mr. Gehry, who appeared at the exhibition to show off his model for the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. “It’s an opportunity for the world of art and culture that is not available anywhere else because you’re building a desert enclave without the contextual constraints of a city.”

No cost estimates were given for the buildings unveiled on Wednesday, but each is certain to run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.

For the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, Mr. Gehry envisions a 320,000-square-foot structure with 130,000 square feet of exhibition space built around a cluster of galleries, a space far larger than his Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain, which cost about $100 million. A jumble of blocks, glass awnings and open spaces, the Abu Dhabi Guggenheim would be centered on a core of galleries of varying height atop one another and forming a courtyard. A second ring of larger galleries is followed by a third ring of galleries housing raw industrial-looking spaces with exposed lighting and mechanical systems.

The design for the classical museum enters into a dialogue with its surroundings, suggesting a submerged archaeological field with a cluster of one-room buildings placed along a promenade. The complex is covered by a massive translucent dome etched in patterns that allow diffused light into the spaces below.

Mr. Ando’s maritime museum design borrows from the maritime history of the emirates, with a reflective surface merging sea and land and a shiplike interior with floating decks.

Ms. Hadid’s performing arts center concept, which seems part spaceship, part organism, is to house a music hall, concert hall, opera house and two theaters, one seating up to 6,300. Transparent and airy, the center hovers over the azure waters of the Persian Gulf.

“It’s an inspiration from nature and an organic design, with a fluid design, as well as a space with good sound,” Ms. Hadid said.

Abu Dhabi’s sheiks dreamed up this sweeping cultural project in late 2004, after brainstorming ways to attract more tourism to the emirate, which is the richest of the seven in the United Arab Emirates confederation, but has largely missed out on the flood of visitors attracted by its neighbor Dubai.

Flush with cash from the oil boom, the emirate has embarked on a development spree intended to update its infrastructure after years of limited development. Abu Dhabi’s tourist board insists it is not trying to one-up Dubai, but instead wants to complement Dubai’s emphasis on other forms of entertainment.

“The real strategic decision here is that Dubai has established itself as a tourist destination, and Abu Dhabi is complementing what Dubai is doing,” said Barry Lord, president of Lord Cultural Resources, which has helped manage the development of the cultural project. “Cultural tourists are wealthier, older, more educated, and they spend more. From an economic view, this makes sense.”

Abu Dhabi’s Tourism Development and Investment Company announced a deal to build the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi last year. Recently it reached a $1 billion accord to rent the name, art and expertise of the Louvre for a museum to be built on the island. Protests quickly arose in France that that country was selling its patrimony to the highest bidder. The emirate’s tourism officials played down the Louvre plan on Wednesday, insisting the deal was not final.

Mr. Lord noted that the arts project was taking shape against the backdrop of continued turbulence in the Middle East.

“They are very conscious here that this can change the cultural climate in the region,” Mr. Lord said. “To be able to add high culture at the high end of international culture, this is a tremendous change.”

After oil booms in the 1970s and 80s in which their proceeds were not always used wisely, Persian Gulf governments are now focusing on spending their surpluses on infrastructure projects and real-estate development. A new generation of leaders in the gulf, especially in the emirates, where a new ruler was installed only in late 2004 and where several ministers are still in their 30s, has looked beyond traditional real-estate projects to efforts that would help their cities stand out on the world stage.

Other Persian Gulf countries have turned to the arts too. In Qatar the final touches are being added to I. M. Pei’s latest structure, the Qatar Museum, built just off the coast of the capital, Doha, to house a new Islamic arts collection. In Sharjah, another emirate, which has fashioned itself as the cultural capital of the Persian Gulf, the Sharjah Art Museum continues to expand its collection and is planning its eighth biennial. And even Dubai is building a Culture Village, centered on an opera house also designed by Ms. Hadid and other arts and culture institutions.

“This is not just about tourism; it also has global cultural dimensions,” Mubarak Muhairi, the director general of the Abu Dhabi tourism authority, said. “We believe the best vehicle for crossing borders is art. And this region is in need of such artistic initiatives.”


Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company Privacy Policy 

Arts & Leisure Preview:  A Vision in the Desert

By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF

Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

FIFTY years ago this modest slice of the Persian Gulf coast was a sleepy settlement of palm-front huts and Bedouin encampments, its few thousand inhabitants mostly subsisting on fishing and the pearl-diving trade. Oil changed all that of course, and since the 1960s Abu Dhabi has morphed into a modern capital of hotels and high rises, fulfilling the economic vision of the United Arab Emirates’ ambitious former leader, Sheik Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahayan.
Now the city is on the verge of another audacious leap. Over the next decade or so it aims to become one of the great cultural centers of the Middle East: the heir, in its way, to cosmopolitan cities of old like Beirut, Cairo and Baghdad.

This latter-day Xanadu, as envisioned in a glittering multimillion-dollar exhibition in the lobby of the opulent Emirates Palace Hotel here, would boast four museums, a performing arts center and 19 art pavilions designed by celebrated architects like Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid and Jean Nouvel. The development could include leading cultural lights of the West, from the Guggenheim to the Louvre to Yale University.

Just one component of a $27 billion residential, office and hotel development planned for Saadiyat Island (Island of Happiness), the 670-acre cultural district is still in the nascent stages. Most of the major cultural institutions have yet to sign on officially, and the Guggenheim, for one, is well known for chasing unrealized dreams.

Some will dismiss this kingdom of culture as a mere tourist development in which art, history and regional identity are reduced to marketing commodities. But those who view it as an exercise in global branding or as a feel-good story about an Arab country willing to embrace the values of Western modernity are missing the point.

With once-proud cities like Beirut and Baghdad ripped apart by political conflict bordering on civil war, Abu Dhabi offers the hope of a major realignment, a chance to plant the seeds for a fertile new cultural model in the Middle East.

It’s easy to be skeptical. But judging by the designs released so far, the buildings promise to be more than aesthetic experiments, outlining a vision of cross-cultural pollination.

For Abu Dhabi’s tourist and development authority, mapping out a mix of marinas and beachfront resorts seemed straightforward enough. But when it came to the cultural master plan, the agency decided to call in Thomas Krens, director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, known for his campaign to open a dozen Guggenheim branches in places like Singapore, St. Petersburg and Rio de Janeiro (few of which have been built).

He began by pulling together a list of famous architectural talents. For the Guggenheim Mr. Gehry was enlisted to replicate his success in Bilbao, Spain. Mr. Nouvel was offered a “classical” museum that could house visiting exhibitions from the Louvre, Ms. Hadid a performing arts center and Tadao Ando a maritime museum. (Each building is expected to run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.)

Mr. Krens worked with Skidmore Owings & Merrill to revamp the original master plan, adding a canal flanked by a string of 19 pavilions that could be used to present art and architecture biennials — a not-so-subtle knockoff of the highly successful Venice Biennale. Meanwhile the development authority began a series of conversations with Yale University about creating an arts school — encompassing art, architecture, dance and drama — directly across the performing arts center. Next on the agenda is a competition to design a national museum.

In some ways this array suggests the market’s insatiable appetite for novelty rather than a cohesive vision. In the early stages the various cultural institutions will rely mostly on art loans from foreign museums and performances by touring companies. For the time being Abu Dhabi has no opera company or orchestra that would use the performing arts center as a permanent home.

And the exhibition at the Emirates Palace Hotel comes across as an extravagant marketing pitch to the country’s rulers, who have yet to give the project final approval. A chunk is devoted to the Guggenheim Bilbao, a blunt reminder of how architecture has been used as a marketing gambit. A wall text unabashedly projects figures on the income the cultural hub could generate through new tourism.

But in Abu Dhabi, Mr. Krens has found a client whose interest runs deeper than collecting tourist dollars. Sheik Sultan bin Tahnoon al-Nahyan, chief of the tourist and development authority, says the emirate’s desire is to create a contemporary cultural locus with little precedent in the region.

“What is happening is unfortunate in places like Beirut,” Sheik Sultan said. “We want it to come back to its old days.” Ultimately, he added, the emirate hopes that Abu Dhabi’s arts district will become a cultural hub of the Middle East and a starting point for cultural exchange.

Given the difficulties Muslims have encountered traveling to and doing business in the United States and Europe since 9/11, the project can also be read as an attempt to recreate the experience of the West in a secure zone for Arabs, a kind of mini-Switzerland of the Middle East.

Of the architects enlisted so far Mr. Nouvel in particular has spent his career exploring the intersection between the intricacies of local cultures and Western modernism. For his 1987 Institute of the Arab World in Paris, he designed a gridlike facade of mechanical oculi that open and close like camera lenses, evoking an Arab mashrabiya, or latticework window. His anarchic Musée du Quai Branly, which opened in Paris last summer, evokes a violent collision of modern and tribal forms.

For Abu Dhabi, Mr. Nouvel conceived of his classical museum as a watery warren of buildings, plazas, alleyways and canals evoking a small city floating on the sea. A shallow lacelike steel dome nearly 600 feet in diameter hovers over the complex, shielding it from the heat and allowing a delicate pattern of light to filter down to the open-air courts.

The dome recalls traditional mosques and perhaps the enormous geodesic dome that Buckminster Fuller once proposed erecting over Lower Manhattan, a delicate container meant for the rich cultural mix throbbing underneath. It’s as if Mr. Nouvel has fashioned a contemporary Venice, a remarkable expression of the creative magic that can arise when East and West collide.

Although the development company has approached several art institutions about lending artworks to the museum, most notably the Louvre in Paris, its mission is still relatively vague. To accommodate the need for flexibility, the complex is conceived as a series of interconnected galleries whose sequence can be easily reconfigured depending on the scale and nature of an exhibition. Mr. Nouvel also envisions the art spilling out onto the alleyways and courtyards, from sculpture to mosaics.

Mr. Gehry’s Guggenheim, planned for a choice site at the tip of the island, is also conceived as a series of galleries loosely arranged around open-air courtyards, a bit like a souk. But the similarity between the two museums ends there. Passing through a glass atrium, visitors will enter a court enclosed by an enormous cone-shape wind tower. A series of conventional galleries are stacked loosely around the court. Two big warehouse-like galleries spill outward from there, interspersed by several cone-shape exhibition spaces that are tipped on their sides and open to the surrounding landscape.

The mix of conventional and oddly shaped galleries harks back to the design for the Guggenheim Bilbao. But like all of Mr. Gehry’s best work, the design draws inspiration from its immediate context. The cone-shape galleries, which he says are derived from traditional Islamic wind towers, will draw air up through the interiors, cooling them in the summer heat. Their curved forms, which might be fashioned from alabaster or a high-tech fabric, vaguely evoke traditional Bedouin tents.

Mr. Nouvel and Mr. Gehry have ingeniously harnessed local architectural traditions without stooping to superficial interpretations of historical styles. Intrinsically their designs acknowledge that the flow of culture between East and West has not always been one-sided. If they convey nostalgia, it is for a belief in the future.

Ms. Hadid’s design for the performing arts center springs from the complex nature of the site rather than an exploration of cultural memory. Her building will punctuate the district’s cultural main axis, which runs from the site of the future national museum to the waterfront, and offers a sweeping view of Abu Dhabi’s existing skyline.

Looming aggressively over the water’s edge, the structure’s taut glistening form calls to mind a gigantic snake, its tail tapering off toward the national museum. Ms. Hadid describes the complex as a system of entwined branches with four concert halls trapped inside them like luscious fruit.

The belly of the main hall rises into the air, with a waterfront promenade passing directly underneath. At the intersection of the promenade and the main axis, a large public court is crowned by a towering atrium, a potent contrast with the cocoonlike halls.

Of the four designs presented so far, Mr. Ando’s design for the maritime museum seems the feeblest. A stylized stone block that stands in the middle of an enormous reflecting pool, its arching form and cavernous interiors look like an apparition from the ’70s. And the proposals for the biennial pavilions, designed by an array of younger talents over the past month, are a mixed bag ranging from inspired to clumsy.

Yet overall it is heartening to see Western architects engaged in seeking a balance between the brute force of global culture — its ruthless effacement of differences, its Darwinian indifference to the have-nots — and the fragility of local traditions.

A half-century ago the modern forms exported by American and European architects were mostly uniform expressions of the triumph of Western modernity. Today most serious practitioners are willing to acknowledge that cultures are forever evolving, and subject to new interpretation.

The question is whether the creative momentum of the individual designs can be maintained in the cultural district over all. Though still in the early stages, the master plan is a disappointment. It represents nothing so much as an outmoded 19th-century planning formula, — an axial Beaux-Arts scheme with hotels, marinas and cultural monuments sprinkled along the edges. The meandering canal, which was obviously added as an afterthought, is a weak attempt to soften the design’s rigid geometries.

But for Abu Dhabi’s cultural planners the ultimate challenge lies in taking a hard look at the global role of the arts. The world has changed radically since the completion of the Guggenheim Bilbao 10 years ago. The old cosmopolitan models — the avant-garde Modernism of mid-century Beirut, the intermingling of Muslims, Jews and Christians in Baghdad or Basra in Iraq — are unraveling. Once considered great tapestries of human experience, those cities are either riven by internal conflict or, like their Western counterparts, risk being transformed into sanitized theme parks.

More and more, large-scale cultural developments are being used to promote that transformation. At their most cynical they can conjure architecture’s function as a tool of Western propaganda during the cold war, the trade shows and expos packed with symbols of suburban affluence.

This issue is especially resonant in the Middle East, where the basic choice is sometimes presented as embracing a sterile brand of modernity or slipping back into the Middle Ages.

In this context the two most promising elements of the Abu Dhabi plan may be the least developed ones — the national museum and the arts school — since both have the potential to engage a new generation of Arabs in a complex cultural conversation.

As for the Guggenheim, the Louvre and other Western institutions involved in the project, they need to show they are serious about a deeper kind of cultural commitment. For a start they could set up permanent curatorial staffs here to plan ambitious programming rather than lending minor Renaissance masters or second-tier Rauchenbergs and Turrells. Ideally those museum positions will one day be filled by trained Arab graduates.

Otherwise we are simply pushing around pretty cultural commodities — and reinforcing the cultural rifts we claim to be dismantling.


Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company