For many years, Mexican telecommunications billionaire Carlos Slim lived a deliberately understated lifestyle. He toiled in a windowless, bunker-like office surrounded by leather-bound history books, colonial-era paintings, and baseball paraphernalia. His most personal luxuries in the concrete structure appeared to be Cohiba cigars and monogrammed shirts.
As his telecom empire expanded and his wealth ballooned, Slim spruced up his surroundings and accumulated an art collection that today includes 66,000 pieces, from 15th-century European masters to the second-largest private collection of sculptures by Auguste Rodin outside of France.
Now Slim, whose estimated US$59 billion net worth makes him one of the world’s richest people, is making waves with a boldly designed art museum he is building in Mexico City.
Imagine a gleaming aluminum cube that has been stretched and twisted so that it soars 46m into the sky, its curving upper contours reminiscent of the bow of a ship. The design is at once whimsical and structurally daring.
The 17,000m2 Soumaya Museum, with exhibition space on five levels, is rising quickly in a former industrial district where General Motors Corp operated an automobile assembly plant until the 1990s.
Named after Slim’s late wife, the museum is part of a 4.9 hectare urban development that will include the corporate headquarters for Slim’s business conglomerate, Grupo Carso, and Telcel, the Mexican mobile phone company he controls. There will also be a small shopping mall, two upscale apartment towers and an underground theater.
The entire project was designed by someone very close to Slim: his son-in-law Fernando Romero, 38, who before setting up his own practice in Mexico City worked for four years with the Office for Metropolitan Architecture under Pritzker Prize-winning architect and urbanist Rem Koolhaas in Rotterdam.
Romero, who is married to Slim’s daughter, also named Soumaya, has won praise in international design competitions. He is well regarded in Mexico’s architectural community.
“I don’t know if having a famous father-in-law is such a good thing at this early stage of his career, but some of his work is very provocative and fresh,” says Bernardo Gomez Pimienta, one of Mexico’s leading architects.
Romero’s Soumaya Museum is the latest eye-catching showcase for the art collections of wealthy patrons, a global phenomenon that Jose Maria Nava, head of the undergraduate architecture department at the Iberoamerican University in Mexico City, where Romero studied, calls “buildings as spectacles.”
Each of the museum’s 28 columns is different.
“We curl steel plates into tubes and then we give the right curvature to each of them — each column has different properties, depending on the weight of the building that it will be supporting,” Romero says.
(In keeping with Slim’s penchant for vertical integration, a company he owns that builds offshore oil rigs is manufacturing the steel columns.)
In June last year, when construction already had begun, Romero brought in Gehry Technologies, an engineering/design firm founded by architect Frank Gehry. A half-dozen engineers, software whizzes, and architects using 3D aerospace design technology have been working with Romero to design a workable external skin for the unusual structure.
Romero originally wanted to create a facade of Carrara marble, reminiscent of the glimmering surface of the Taj Majal. “Marble is coming back to industrial design. Some of the most influential designers are using marble,” he says.
Slim wanted something more modern, so they settled on shiny aluminum. The museum will be covered by more than 16,000 hexagonal aluminum plates arranged in a complex, computer-designed honeycomb pattern.
Building-cost estimates of US$34 million have floated through the architecture community, a number Romero would not confirm or deny. The museum is expected to open to the public by the end of this year, after only a year of actual construction.
Romero hasn’t made a public presentation, and most of the drawings circulating on the Web don’t reflect the final design. Slim, a lightning rod of criticism for his immense fortune and domination of Mexico’s phone industry, may well be pleased to let the building twist mysteriously out of the ground in the final form that he and Romero have so meticulously planned.
The 2018 nine-in-one local elections were a wild ride that no one saw coming. Entering that year, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) was demoralized and in disarray — and fearing an existential crisis. By the end of the year, the party was riding high and swept most of the country in a landslide, including toppling the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in their Kaohsiung stronghold. Could something like that happen again on the DPP side in this year’s nine-in-one elections? The short answer is not exactly; the conditions were very specific. However, it does illustrate how swiftly every assumption early in an
Francis William White, an Englishman who late in the 1860s served as Commissioner of the Imperial Customs Service in Tainan, published the tale of a jaunt he took one winter in 1868: A visit to the interior of south Formosa (1870). White’s journey took him into the mountains, where he mused on the difficult terrain and the ease with which his little group could be ambushed in the crags and dense vegetation. At one point he stays at the house of a local near a stream on the border of indigenous territory: “Their matchlocks, which were kept in excellent order,
Jan. 19 to Jan. 25 In 1933, an all-star team of musicians and lyricists began shaping a new sound. The person who brought them together was Chen Chun-yu (陳君玉), head of Columbia Records’ arts department. Tasked with creating Taiwanese “pop music,” they released hit after hit that year, with Chen contributing lyrics to several of the songs himself. Many figures from that group, including composer Teng Yu-hsien (鄧雨賢), vocalist Chun-chun (純純, Sun-sun in Taiwanese) and lyricist Lee Lin-chiu (李臨秋) remain well-known today, particularly for the famous classic Longing for the Spring Breeze (望春風). Chen, however, is not a name
There is no question that Tyrannosaurus rex got big. In fact, this fearsome dinosaur may have been Earth’s most massive land predator of all time. But the question of how quickly T. rex achieved its maximum size has been a matter of debate. A new study examining bone tissue microstructure in the leg bones of 17 fossil specimens concludes that Tyrannosaurus took about 40 years to reach its maximum size of roughly 8 tons, some 15 years more than previously estimated. As part of the study, the researchers identified previously unknown growth marks in these bones that could be seen only
RSS