Architecture January 26, 2010, 10:51AM EST

Mexico's Carlos Slim Builds a Dazzling Art Palace

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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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Engineered with Ove Arup and Gehry

Romero came up with 10 designs. "The client is a civil engineer himself, and has been putting up very rational buildings all of his life," Romero explains. "But over the last 10 years, he started becoming more interested in contemporary architecture and decided he wanted to do something extremely contemporary."

To deal with the structural challenges of the chosen design, Romero turned to the Los Angeles offices of Ove Arup, an engineering firm known for its work on the Sydney Opera House, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Beijing Olympics' Bird's Nest and Water Cube venues. Romero knew Arup from their collaboration on the Rem Koolhaas-designed Casa da Música concert hall in Porto, Portugal, completed in 2005.

Each of the museum's 28 columns is different. "We curl steel plates into tubes and then we give the right curvature to each of them—each column has different properties, depending on the weight of the building that it will be supporting," Romero says. (In keeping with Slim's penchant for vertical integration, a company he owns that builds offshore oil rigs is manufacturing the steel columns.)

Last June, when construction already had begun, Romero brought in Gehry Technologies, an engineering/design firm founded by legendary architect Frank Gehry. A half-dozen engineers, software whizzes, and architects using 3D aerospace design technology have been working with Romero to design a workable external skin for the unusual structure.

Construction schedule: One year

Romero originally wanted to create a façade of Carrara marble, reminiscent of the glimmering surface of the Taj Majal. "Marble is coming back to industrial design. Some of the most influential designers are using marble," he says.

Slim wanted something more modern, so they settled on shiny aluminum. The museum will be covered by more than 16,000 hexagonal aluminum plates arranged in a complex, computer-designed honeycomb pattern.

Estimates of $34 million have floated through the architecture community, a number Romero would not confirm or deny. The museum is expected to open to the public by the end of this year, after only a year of actual construction.

Romero hasn't made a public presentation, and most of the drawings circulating on the Web don't reflect the final design. It's possible that the young architect, charged with an ambitious commission that most designers don't get until they're at least in their 50s, wants to avoid second-guessing from his peers. Slim, a lightning rod of criticism for his immense fortune and domination of Mexico's phone industry, may well be pleased to let the building twist mysteriously out of the ground in the final form that he and Romero have so meticulously planned.

Smith is Bloomberg BusinessWeek's Latin American correspondent, in Mexico City.