The final 20 percent of funding needed to build a proposed US$400 million Guggenheim Museum in Taichung may be approved this week, said Thomas Krens, director of the Solomon Guggenheim Foundation in New York.
"We're expecting approval of the final 20 percent from the city council by the end of this week," Krens said during a symposium of the Business Committee for the Arts, a New York-based nonprofit organization.
"This project actually could be under construction as early as the end of 2004,'' he said.
The museum in Taichung would expand the Guggenheim's international scope. In addition to Bilbao, the Guggenheim Foundation has created satellite museums in Las Vegas, Nevada, Venice, Italy and Berlin, Germany.
The museum, designed by Zaha Hadid, an Iraqi-born architect based in London, would be 119,600m2.
That is the same siz as the Guggenheim Bilbao, a stainless-steel structure by architect Frank Gehry that is a tourist attraction in the Basque region of Spain.
"It's like nothing I've ever seen," Krens said of Hadid's design. "It's a brand new vocabulary for museum architecture."
Premier Yu Shyi-kun said last month that his government would fund 80 percent of the project to as much as NT$5 billion.
Plans for the Taiwanese museum are in the preliminary stages, Anthony Calnek, a Guggenheim spokesman, said.
"We're in the middle of the feasibility study period still," he said. "And the next step is a negotiation between the two parties."
The Guggenheim Foundation also has plans to build a branch in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
In April, Mayor Cesar Maia agreed to pay the foundation US$32.7 million to develop a US$250 million museum on Rio's waterfront designed by French architect Jean Nouvel.
However, in June, a Brazilian court blocked construction of the museum after opponents filed a lawsuit.
Taiwanese were praised for their composure after a video filmed by Taiwanese tourists capturing the moment a magnitude 7.5 earthquake struck Japan’s Aomori Prefecture went viral on social media. The video shows a hotel room shaking violently amid Monday’s quake, with objects falling to the ground. Two Taiwanese began filming with their mobile phones, while two others held the sides of a TV to prevent it from falling. When the shaking stopped, the pair calmly took down the TV and laid it flat on a tatami mat, the video shows. The video also captured the group talking about the safety of their companions bathing
US climber Alex Honnold is to attempt to scale Taipei 101 without a rope and harness in a live Netflix special on Jan. 24, the streaming platform announced on Wednesday. Accounting for the time difference, the two-hour broadcast of Honnold’s climb, called Skyscraper Live, is to air on Jan. 23 in the US, Netflix said in a statement. Honnold, 40, was the first person ever to free solo climb the 900m El Capitan rock formation in Yosemite National Park — a feat that was recorded and later made into the 2018 documentary film Free Solo. Netflix previewed Skyscraper Live in October, after videos
Starting on Jan. 1, YouBike riders must have insurance to use the service, and a six-month trial of NT$5 coupons under certain conditions would be implemented to balance bike shortages, a joint statement from transportation departments across Taipei, New Taipei City and Taoyuan announced yesterday. The rental bike system operator said that coupons would be offered to riders to rent bikes from full stations, for riders who take out an electric-assisted bike from a full station, and for riders who return a bike to an empty station. All riders with YouBike accounts are automatically eligible for the program, and each membership account
A classified Pentagon-produced, multiyear assessment — the Overmatch brief — highlighted unreported Chinese capabilities to destroy US military assets and identified US supply chain choke points, painting a disturbing picture of waning US military might, a New York Times editorial published on Monday said. US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s comments in November last year that “we lose every time” in Pentagon-conducted war games pitting the US against China further highlighted the uncertainty about the US’ capability to intervene in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. “It shows the Pentagon’s overreliance on expensive, vulnerable weapons as adversaries field cheap, technologically
RSS