Guggenheim plans massive museum in Abu Dhabi

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates – The Guggenheim announced plans Saturday for a Frank Gehry-designed art museum in Abu Dhabi, a coup for the small Persian Gulf nation and the latest international franchise for the ambitious foundation.

With its flagship museum in New York and branches in Las Vegas; Berlin; Venice, Italy; and Bilbao, Spain, the Guggenheim said its new outpost in Abu Dhabi would be its biggest venture yet.

“This is hugely ambitious, the scale of it is amazing, and they have the resources to do it,” foundation director Thomas Krens said after signing the deal with the government and royal family of Abu Dhabi, one of the seven city states of the United Arab Emirates.

“It will have an enormously beneficial impact on how creativity is viewed in this part of the world,” Krens said.

The museum would sit on a manmade spit jutting into the Gulf from the currently uninhabited Saadiyat Island, which lies adjacent to Abu Dhabi. With a price tag of just over $200 million, the building would be completed in about five years.

The renowned Gehry designed Guggenheim Bilbao – with its distinctive titanium-sheathed curves – considered by many to be his masterwork and one of the world’s great modern buildings. His other projects include a Seattle museum dedicated to rock icon Jimi Hendrix and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.

Speaking to the Associated Press, the Canadian-born architect said the Arabian desert has a “much different feel” than the desert near his California home and would require him to “invent a different kind of architecture that belongs here.

“I want to play off the blue water and the color of the sand and sky and sun,” Gehry said Saturday. “It’s got to be something that will make sense here. If you import something and plop it down, it’s not going to work.”

He said his design would be unveiled in November, when the Guggenheim Foundation plans to bring a collection of Russian modernist paintings to a temporary exhibition space in Abu Dhabi’s Emirates Palace hotel.

Announcing the new museum, Crown Prince Sheik Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan said the nation plans to acquire a prestige collection for the museum by the time it opens in 2012.