Frank Gehry’s long-awaited Guggenheim Museum in Abu Dhabi will be open in 2026, said the institution’s director Richard Armstrong at a press briefing held in Basel.
“We think it should be five years from next week,” he said, adding that he is due to visit the Middle East shortly. “It looks like everything is coming together so we can say something definitive. It has been a relatively long gestation,” he said.
The $200 million satellite museum has been pushed back several times—the project was first announced in 2006 and scheduled to open in 2012, and later a new opening date was set for 2017. We are four years later and it did not happen.
The Guggenheim Museum will be located on the Northwestern tip of a new cultural district in Abu Dhabi, Saadiyat Island. In its context, several important projects are taking place, including Jean Novel’s Louvre, Foster + Partners’ Zayed National Museum, Zaha Hadid’s Performing Arts Center, and Tadao Ando’s Maritime Museum.
Frank Gehry describes his building to be “intentionally messy, moving into clarity”. This Guggenheim museum will feature the biggest space any Guggenheim museum currently holds; it has an area of some 320,000 square feet, distributed over four levels of galleries around an atrium.
The galleries will be connected by glass bridges, and the museum will also feature eleven iconic cone-like structures to provide more exhibition space. Moreover, an education center and a 350-seat theater will provide a variety of educational and performing arts programs, including lectures, panels, symposia, music recitals, theater productions, film viewings, and performance.
“We’ve had a very active acquisitions program [at the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi] for about 12 years now in the region and globally; it’ll be a museum that looks at the whole world from 1965,” Armstrong added.
“Even though it was painful in many ways, including people being put on furlough for a bit, and other people having reduced salaries… it became a time of change and adaptation at the museum and I have a feeling this may have been true at museums in Europe for different reasons. in any case, we have survived. I think we’ve come out as a better institution that is looking more to the future.”
Image: TDIC and Gehry Partners, LLP