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MEXICO CITY
FREE
IN MARCH, IN EVEHY supermarket in Mexico City, architect Fernando Romero stared back at queuing shoppers from the cover of Quién magazine. To his right stood the gleaming paraboloid of his latest project, the Museo Soumaya in Mexico City, and over it a headline that read, "Slim's Soumaya: How Fernando Romero Realized His Father-inLaw's Dream."
That's Slim as in Carlos Slim, the man who last year edged out Bill Gates for the title of world's wealthiest individual. The Museo Soumaya, named foi the telecom billionaire's late wife, stands as an enigmatic monument, like nothing else on the Mexico City streetscape. But though it may be Slim's "dream," the design is very much Fernando Romero 's . An alumnus of lean Nouvel's office as well as Rem Koolhaas', the architect founded his own film 12 years ago at the age of 28, and to date, Fernando Romero Enterprise (FREE) has realized some 25 projects.
Romero's kin and client is also the country's biggest art collector, and for the last 17 years the works have been on display at a makeshift museum in the southern part of the city. Four years ago, Slim's conglomerate Grupo Carso acquired a i2-acre parcel near the corner of Presa Falcon and Miguel de Cervantes, at the time a dusty industrial yard home to a tire factory. Today, christened Plaza Carso, it's a district of modern office towers and public plazas - all of it planned, and most of the new buildings designed by Romero as a setting for Soumaya.
The architect was familiar, of course, with the collection that the museum was meant to houseincluding the largest number of works by sculptor Auguste Rodin outside France - but that was about ail he and his team had to go on. When the office received the commission, "we weren't given a museological program," says Laura Domínguez, who's overseeing the completion of the building interiors in collaboration with designer Andrés Mier y Teran. "All we knew was that it was to be six gallery floors and 16,000 square meters [172,223 square feet]," as well as the sue where the museum had to fit in the master plan that the firm was devising for Plaza Carso. Even up to the very...