Guadalajara, Mexico’s second biggest city, is packed with mildly neglected colonial buildings with wrought-iron window guards and flamboyant, paint-chipped color washes, squeezed between minimalist 60s and 70s era cubic structures and various bastardizations in between. As contemporary architecture goes, the city is not in the vanguard.

Back in 2005, however, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation conducted an architectural design competition for a proposed Guadalajara satellite museum. The tattered Mexican city looked to Bilbao for inspiration: what better to transform a lagging sister city into a booming cultural center than the Guggenheim Foundation’s latest conceptual whim?

The 1997 Frank Gehry-designed Bilbao museum showed the world the Guggenheim presence has a Midas touch. The drab Spanish industrial town was transformed into a busy cultural center overnight, and the rest of the world took note. A fleet of over 100 cities have petitioned for a similar franchise, and Guggenheim has since set up shop in Venice, Berlin, and Las Vegas. An outpost in Abu Dhabi, the largest of the seven United Arab Emirates, will open in 2011.

When architects took on the design competition to create Guadalajara’s Guggenheim museum, nothing less than the most modern of marvels was conceived. Enrique Norten, a Mexico City native and head architect of TEN Arquitectos, won the contest with an airy, vertical masterpiece.

There was a catch to this design. The museum’s site was not to be constructed in Guadalajara’s neglected city center, but on the northeastern edge of the sprawling metropolis, which is quite literally an edge. The packed, arid neighborhoods suddenly drop off like Thelma and Louise into a sheer, shrub covered 2,000-feet-deep gorge called La Barranca de Oblatos (or the Huentitan Canyon). The stunning ravine, carved below by the Rio Santiago, was declared an ecological preserve in 1993.

The location has always looked absurd to visiting urbanites who don’t have a spectacular gorge in their backyard. Imagine the Grand Canyon spreading just beyond Brooklyn, for instance. Infrequently visited by the throngs of people that live in its surrounding metropolis, La Barranca is a 2,800-acre secret. And now, by placing on its edge an emblem of modern design, it plans to become even more of an oddity.

What Mr. Norten envisioned was a transparent, five-story structure balanced on the canyon’s rim, a “double-skinned tower that acts as a luminous beacon at the edge of the remarkably horizontal city,” as a Guggenheim report described. Classical galleries, all visible from the outside are formed in clusters of three or four and two “big box” galleries are located at the top and bottom of the museum. The interstice behind the glass façade will also serve as gallery space for large scale installations and site-specific art. A spiral staircase connects each floor, winding around the gallery spaces up to the top third part of the tower, where it disappears behind a solid white façade. The opaque crown dissolves into the clouds above. At the tower’s crux, a wide platform juts out into the free space over the gorge, like a bridge abandoned halfway through its construction.

The Guggenheim Guadalajara museum, however, remains an illusion. When it was schemed in 2005, the Guggenheim foundation called it “conceptual” and set the McKinsey and Company consulting firm to conduct feasibility studies costing around $2 million. At the time, when The New York Times interviewed Mr. Norten about the Guadalajara design, he said, “I think it’s very real. All of the parts are there. It’s just going to be a delicate packaging effort.” Despite his optimism, the museum is currently on hold. Claire Laporte, a Guggenheim spokesperson, said the museum’s focus has shifted toward Abu Dhabi.

Feelings are mixed in the city. Despite its distinctive location, most local citizens would be hard-pressed to shuttle beyond city limits to see an art exhibition. City Hall does not believe this to be a snag. They say the museum will attract around 803,000 visitors a year—53 percent Mexican and 47 percent foreign. But foreign visitors, just like local residents who live downtown, will find it no easier to reach the natural wonder. The surrounding neighborhoods are not set up for mass tourism; in fact, many represent the grim reality of living far from the urban center, with unpaved roads and jacked power lines. Guadalajara’s infrastructure barely manages to support its current mounting population. Its underground train runs on only a line and a half, and with more cars per person than any other Mexican city, congestion is slowing Guadalajara down to a halt.

What’s more, the finances are severely lacking. The museum is expected to cost upwards of $170 million dollars, but in 2007 only $4 million had been stowed away in a trust fund. The estimate does not factor in infrastructural upgrades that would be necessary for successful operation, which could inflate the bill to $300 million.

Local promoters of the museum have all but bribed the Guggenheim Foundation to the Guadalajara. Thomas Krens, the Guggenheim board director who announced his departure in February after two decades of leadership, was in 2006 awarded the Order of the Aztec Eagle, the highest Mexican decoration bestowed to foreigners. The honor was widely disputed. Michael Forbes, editor of English-language newspaper The Guadalajara Reporter wrote in an editorial that “luminaries who devoted their lives to Mexico, including local business pioneer Adolph Horn and culinary researcher Diana Kennedy had to wait until they were well into their eighties before this country bestowed the Aztec Eagle honor on them,” and that “the Guggenheim Foundation approved Guadalajara’s bid far too quickly, brushing aside the city’s appalling infrastructure deficiencies.”

In addition to Mr. Krens’ stepping down, other internal setbacks may be affecting the Guggenheim group’s vision. Peter B. Lewis, a longtime Guggenheim board member who had contributed more to the foundation than any other member in history, quit in early 2005 due to a conflict between his and Mr. Krens’ perception of the museum’s expansion. He specifically objected to the Guggenheim’s “McDonaldization,” opining that the museum’s focus should remain on the flagship location in New York.

Museum decentralization has become an irrefutable trend. France’s Louvre and Pompidou are also opening international branches, and Britain’s Tate has established three domestic spinoffs. Western museums were once a way to show foreign art and antiquities to people who didn’t travel. Today, explains Alan Riding for The New York Times, “with tourists representing around half the visitors to leading European museums, the issue is less how to draw crowds than what to do with tens of thousands of works of art that never go on display.” The Guggenheim museum in Guadalajara may remain a casualty of this hasty globalization. The city will host the Pan American Games in 2011, so it’s safe to say Guadalajara has a lot on its plate.

>Written by d/visible contributor Meredith Veto.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 1st, 2008 at 4:00 pm and is filed under Culture, Architecture, Art & Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.