Depending on what the financial markets are doing, Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim is either described as the richest, or the second richest, or sometimes the third richest man in the world. But he keeps a very low profile in the world of philanthropy and culture, though he has been loosening his wallet — currently estimated at close to $60 billion — in the last few years.
Now he’s about to give Mexico a new museum — by year-end. Ground was broken last year on the structure, whose cost has not been disclosed but is estimated at $34 million. The building, designed by Slim’s son-in-law Fernando Romero, an architect who apprenticed with Rem Koolhas, is located in an industrial area of Mexico City.
According to my former colleague Geri Smith, of Business Week,
Four years ago, Slim asked Romero to design a new building for the Soumaya collection, which had outgrown its 15-year-old home in a century-old converted paper factory in an older part of the city. “We wanted to translate his vision and his art collection and this historic moment when Mexico has become part of a more global economic network,” Romero says of Slim, whose business empire spans all of Latin America. His mobile telecom company–just one of his many businesses–has nearly 200 million clients.
Geri says Slim’s 66,000-item collection ranges from “15th century European masters to the second-largest private collection of sculptures by Auguste Rodin outside of France.”
She describes the 183,000 sq. ft. building as a “gleaming aluminum cube that has been stretched and twisted so that it soars 150 feet into the sky, its thrusting, curving upper contours reminiscent of the bow of a ship.”
Read more from her article here. Should be quite a structure — with galleries on five levels.