There was a moment, in the mid-2000s, when the great constellation of Guggenheim museums that was going to spread around the world went dark. In 2016, the center for Helsinki did not surpass, for the second time, the project idea and, that same year, the one in Berlin, opened in 1997, closed its doors. Along the way, the one in Salzburg, Rio de Janeiro, Guadalajara (Mexico), Seoul, Taichun (Taiwan) and the one in southern Manhattan, a supposed second headquarters for New York, had already been left. There were then only two institutions left to move forward: that of Abu Dhabi and that of Urdaibai, in a biosphere reserve in the Basque Country. Two spaces that will join, pending confirmation, those in Manhattan, Bilbao and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, the only three locations maintained by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.
After the death of Frank Gehry, on December 5, the architect who designed the latest projects of the Guggenheim Foundation, photos of the building he designed for Abu Dhabi appeared in the art press. This great museum should have been completed in 2025 for its inauguration in 2026, but the cranes and part of the skeleton of the structure can still be seen today.
It has been 20 years since the first sketch of this building was seen, which began construction in 2011 in the northwest part of Saadiyat Island, where the Cultural District of one of the seven countries of the United Arab Emirates federation is planned. Gehry designed the largest Guggenheim in the world, which will span 42,000 square meters (the one in Bilbao has 24,000 and the one in New York does not reach 5,000). The works stopped in 2019 and were resumed after the pandemic. At the moment, neither the foundation nor the Abu Dani tourism development company, owner of the project, have specified an opening date on the island, where you can already visit the Louvre franchise and the Zayed National Museum, the local institution.
Next week a key meeting will be held at the Guggenheim board to decide the future of the Urdaibai headquarters, in a biosphere reserve in the Basque Country. The execution period expires now and there is still no agreement between the Basque public administrations and the neighborhood associations that oppose the project in this area.
Local disputes were also key for the museum for Helsinki to remain on paper. Local authorities rejected the original project in 2012 by eight votes to seven, considering it too expensive. In the summer of 2015, the French studio Moreau Kusunoki won the architectural competition organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation to design a new museum in the Finnish city. The New York foundation called this architectural competition to try to win the favor of Finnish public opinion and the most reticent local politicians, by presenting a fully finished and as attractive design as possible.
Just one year later, in 2016, the city council once again rejected, this time for good, a complex made up of nine pavilions and a wooden and glass tower, located in the central southern port of the Finnish capital. For the deployment, the City Council reserved a plot of 18,520 square meters, of which 12,000 would be allocated to the building, with an exhibition space similar to that of the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
In the case of Berlin, the agreement between the Guggenheim Foundation and Deutsche Bank ended in 2012, after almost 15 years. Located near Museum Island and in the middle of Unter den Linden, the emblematic avenue that connects it to the Brandenburg Gate, the Deutsche Guggenheim – as the artistic space was known – was one of the organization’s international icons.
The alliance between the bank and the foundation allowed the creation of a collection that was enriched with annual commissions from contemporary creators. There were notable names on the list: Anish Kapoor, Gabriel Orozco, Gerhard Richter and Bill Viola, among others.
When the closure was announced, neither party gave an explanation. The vague promise to “reformulate the relationship between Deutsche Bank and Guggenheim” did not come to fruition. Some time later, the bank inaugurated the Deutsche Bank KunstHalle space, focused on the promotion of emerging artists and the exhibition of their works. The institution closed in 2018 and was recycled into the PalaisPopulaire cultural center.
Juan Ignacio Vidarte, former director of Guggeheim Bilbao and who was responsible for the international expansion of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, already warned in 2012, after the failure of the vote on the Helsinki headquarters, that the institution’s expansion strategy was beginning to take a turn. Then, the manager referred to “projects without a specific location,” in an interview in EL PAÍS. More than a decade later, the closest and most concrete future is on an island in the Persian Gulf.