Buying Culture

The Adta began to study cities that had revitalized themselves by building splashy museums. First stop: Bilbao, Spain. Located in the war-scarred and economically depressed Basque country, Bilbao built a Frank Gehry-designed branch of the Guggenheim in 1997. Since its opening, the museum has drawn more than 9 million visitors and helped create more than 4,300 new jobs a year, contributing a total so far of $2 billion to Spain's GDP.

To replicate this model, the ADTA quickly hired the award-winning California design group Gensler Associates, as well as the architectural firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, which is designing Manhattan's new Freedom Tower. Then in 2005, Sheik Mohammed went to Paris to try to line up the Louvre. It took 18 months of deliberations: d'Haussonville had to persuade the Louvre to lend its name—and its art—to an unproven endeavor, and to assure the Emiratis that they wouldn't just be getting the Louvre's leftovers. "Let's just say it was very delicate finding a consensus," the Frenchman says.

In addition to paying for the name, Abu Dhabi agreed to renovate a wing of the Louvre and the theater of the Château de Fontainebleau, as well as to pay for an art-research center in Paris. In exchange, France promised Abu Dhabi access to thousands of works not just from the Louvre but from other top museums, including the Pompidou Center, the Musée d'Orsay and Versailles. Revered French architect Jean Nouvel, best known for his work on the Arab World Institute in Paris and the Opéra de Lyon, has been enlist-ed to design the Louvre Abu Dhabi. It is expected to cost more than $100 million and be housed in a 24,200-square-meter whitewashed complex modeled after a traditional Arabian souk.

With the first part of the puzzle in place, Abu Dhabi went after the original source of Saadiyat's inspiration: the Guggenheim. At first Thomas Krens, director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, was not impressed with the Gensler master plan. It had all the components of a tourist destination—hotels, three marinas, two golf courses and hundreds of ocean-view apartments—but the cultural district seemed "vague and amorphous," he says.

Rather than turn Abu Dhabi away, however, Krens decided to help it expand its ambitions. "My driving concept was to create a critical mass that by definition would be—rather aggressively—the greatest concentration of contemporary cultural resources in the world," he says. Krens was soon hired, and worked feverishly with his team to hammer out the details. "We looked at what existed around the world, looked at the resources and the scope, and designed our plan to surpass everything," he says.

Even Abu Dhabi's virtually unlimited bank account wasn't enough to make it happen. "Real-estate development in [the U.A.E.] has had a theme-park atmosphere," making it hard to attract prestigious architects, says Krens. But he used his personal relationship with Gehry to persuade the architect to design the new Guggenheim outpost, a cone-and-block-shaped structure that draws inspiration from the U.A.E.'s traditional wind towers. The 30,000-square-meter complex, slated to be completed by 2012, will be the Guggenheim's largest branch. With Gehry onboard, Krens was then able to enlist other star architects: Iraq-born Zaha Hadid will design a 6,300-seat performing-arts center (New York's Lincoln Center is currently in talks to provide programming), and Japanese architect Tadao Ando will create the island's new maritime museum.