New York to donate millions toward new Guggenheim

Architect Frank Gehry's undulating design for the proposed 40-story Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum would transform New York's waterfront at the foot of Wall Street

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(CNN) -- New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said Tuesday the city will contribute $67.8 million toward construction of a Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum on the East River in lower Manhattan.

The money represents about 10 percent of the estimated building cost of $678 million. The museum, the third Guggenheim in New York, will be designed by architect Frank Gehry, who designed the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain.

At 575,000 square feet (51,750 square meters), the new museum would be twice as large as the one in Bilbao. It would be built on connecting platforms resting on piers at water level.

"The city is proud to support this significant expansion of one of the world's great institutions," Giuliani told a news conference. "It will give a boost to our cultural life, and also to lower Manhattan, the historic heart of New York City."

Thomas Krens, director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, told reporters that a fund-raising campaign will be launched in the spring.

Gehry also designed the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, which opened in 1997

"Our expectation is to immediately begin the two-year design and development phase, which includes environmental reviews and obtaining various city, state, and federal approvals," Krens said. Construction is expected to take up to four years.

"I applaud the vision and imagination of Mayor Giuliani," he added. "The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum has been a presence in New York City since 1937," and focuses on artworks from the late 19th and 20th century.

The new museum would relieve space pressures at Guggenheim's Frank Lloyd Wright-designed headquarters on Manhattan's Upper East Side, according to Krens.

More of the prewar permanent collection would be continuously on view in the original museum's 50,000 square feet of gallery space, and the exhibition and education programs there will focus on art from the Impressionist period through the first half of the 20th century.

Construction of the waterfront museum at piers 9, 11, 13 and 14 is expected to create 2,550 jobs and attract up to 3 million visitors a year, according to city officials.

The building would have more than 200,000 square feet of exhibition space, in addition to public park areas, outdoor sculpture gardens, fountains, and a promenade. Plans also call for a Center for Arts Education and a Performing Arts Center with two theaters.

The Guggenheim's other locations are the Guggenheim Museum SoHo in New York; Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice; Guggenheim Museum Bilbao; and Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin.

Gehry has won nearly every major architectural award, including the Pritzker Prize, the Praemium Imperiale Award, the AIA Gold Medal, and the National Medal of the Arts.

In the United States he has designed the Millennium Park Music Pavilion in Chicago, an addition to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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