Architecture January 26, 2010, 10:51AM EST

Mexico's Carlos Slim Builds a Dazzling Art Palace

Telecom billionaire Slim picks a relatively unknown architect for the Soumaya Museum in Mexico City: son-in-law Fernando Romero

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The Soumaya Museum will house the art collection of Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim. LAR Fernando Romero

Fernando Romero spent four years working under Rem Koolhaas in Rotterdam before setting up his own practice in Mexico City. The architect of the Soumaya Museum, Romero is also Carlos Slim's son-in-law. Juan Carlos Polanco

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(This story has been corrected to include the name of Telcel, the Mexico unit of America Móvil that will be located in Carlos Slim's new urban development.)

For many years, Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim lived a deliberately understated lifestyle. He toiled in a windowless, bunker-like office surrounded by leather-bound history books, colonial-era paintings, and baseball paraphernalia. His most personal luxuries in the concrete structure appeared to be Cohiba cigars and monogrammed shirts.

As his telecom empire expanded and his wealth ballooned, Slim spruced up his surroundings and accumulated an art collection that today includes 66,000 pieces, from 15th century European masters to the second-largest private collection of sculptures by Auguste Rodin outside of France.

Now Slim, whose estimated $59 billion net worth makes him one of the world's richest people, is building an art museum in Mexico City.

Imagine 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. It's a design that is at once whimsical and structurally daring.

The 183,000 square-foot Soumaya Museum, with exhibition space on five levels, is going up in a former Mexico City industrial district where General Motors operated an automobile assembly plant until the 1990s. Named after Slim's late wife, the museum is part of a 12-acre urban development that will include two 22-story conventional office towers, including the corporate headquarters for Slim's business conglomerate, Grupo Carso, and Telcel, the Mexico unit of America Móvil, his Latin American wireless phone company. There will also be a small shopping mall, two upscale apartment towers, and an underground theater.

"work is very provocative and fresh"

The entire project was designed by Mexican architect Fernando Romero, 38, who before setting up his own practice in Mexico City worked for four years with the Office for Metropolitan Architecture under Pritzker Prize-winning architect and urbanist Rem Koolhaas in Rotterdam.

Romero, who is married to Slim's daughter, also named Soumaya, has won praise in international design competitions. He is well regarded in Mexico's architectural community. "I don't know if having a famous father-in-law is such a good thing at this early stage of his career, but some of his work is very provocative and fresh," says Bernardo Gómez-Pimienta, one of Mexico's leading architects.

Slim's Soumaya Museum is the latest eye-catching showcase for the art collections of wealthy patrons, a global phenomenon that José Maria Nava, head of the undergraduate architecture department at the Iberoamerican University in Mexico City, where Romero studied, calls "buildings as spectacles." Nava adds: "It's part of a trend that has become very common worldwide—architecture featuring very complex, undulating geometries made possible by computer-aided design, a kind of digital baroque."

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.