Waiting for Frank Gehry's 100th birthday

"Tell my wife I played by the rules until the end. No woman will stay on this ship because Ben Guggenheim was a coward..." said Benjamin Guggenheim, one of the richest men of his time and refused to board a lifeboat on the Titanic. The same was done by another famous rich man on board, John Jacob Astor, who also refused to enter a lifeboat and ended up at the bottom of the Atlantic.

How the richest people in the world (Elon Musk, for example) would act today in a similar situation, we can only guess. Only, they say that during the sinking of the ship "Costa Concordia" in 2012, exactly 100 years after the "Titanic", the old men trampled everything in front of them, pushed women and children, in order not to get hold of the lifeboats.

The two from the beginning of the story are connected by the fact that Guggenheim's widow Florette and their three daughters lived in Astor's "St. Regis" hotel on the corner of New York's 55th Street and 5th Avenue after the "Titanic" tragedy, one of them being the famous Peggy.

More than a century later, the story of the Guggenheim and Astor's St. Regis hotel intersects in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the UAE that is still awaiting the opening of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Museum. Abu Dhabi is also connected to the "Belgrade on the Water" project, in the heart of which, more precisely, "Kuli Beograd", the first "St. Regis" in Central and Eastern Europe was opened last year. Namely, "St. Regis" in Europe, besides Belgrade, only has hotels in Italy (in Florence, Rome and Venice), Spain (Majorca) and Turkey (in Istanbul).

The Solomon Guggenheim Foundation was supposed to open the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi this year. However, the opening was postponed again for a year - to 2026. Before the UAE capital, the foundation founded by Benjamin's brother and the famous philanthropist Solomon, opened the New York Guggenheim, followed by the one in Bilbao, Spain, and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. In the meantime, several museums were closed: in Berlin, Las Vegas and Guadalajara, Mexico. In Helsinki, there was a plan to open the Guggenheim, but in 2016 it was definitively rejected.

When I was in Abu Dhabi two years ago and wrote about the Guggenheim, I hoped that its architect Frank Gehry (the same one who built the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao) would live to see it open. Namely, Gary was 94 at the time, now he is two years older and still waiting. During its construction, which began in 2011, 130 artists from around the world called for a boycott of the future Guggenheim because of the poor working conditions, abuse and death of a large number of construction workers engaged in these two projects.

In the meantime, until the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi opens, if your trip takes you to this city, be sure to visit two other grandiose buildings - the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque and the Louvre Abu Dhabi.

We arrive by Uber in front of the Sheikh Zayed Mosque at dusk, definitely the best time to visit. Not only because of the 40+ Celsius during the day but also because of the much better light for photography and the sky taking on fantastic colours.

When you arrive, you enter the "underground" where there are restaurants, shops, machines where you will receive free QR-codes to visit after entering all your information. We reach the first security control, where they don't check whether you are bringing any dangerous substances or devices into the mosque, but how you are dressed. Men can wear short-sleeved shirts, but not shorts. Women have to cover everything - hair, legs, arms... The friendly staff will direct you to one of the clothing stores where you can get the missing parts. Two scarves for Sandra and India and a man's white kaftan cost us 150 dirhams (about 36 euros). Sandra was immediately warned by the seller that the upper part of her dress was "too transparent", but we said we would try.

We passed the first barrier, a man who just nodded his head, but, a few steps further, his colleague singled out Sandra and confirmed that the upper part of her dress was "too see-through". Repentantly, we return to the store and buy a women's kaftan. First, he asked for 180 dirhams for some "gold embroidered", so, since it is a piece of clothing that is likely to be used once, we asked him for something cheaper. We got a more modest brown kaftan in which Sandra looked like some kind of "nana" from Kalesija, but we weren't allowed to tell her that.

As we go underground towards the Great Mosque, pictures of famous visitors pass by - Queen Elizabeth II, Pope Francis... Finally, the escalator takes us to the surface of the ground and we come out in front of a building that I immediately said was probably one of the most beautiful I've ever seen in my life - and I've really been halfway around the world.

The Sheikh Zayed Mosque is the largest in the United Arab Emirates and only the 23rd largest in the world. The mosque was officially opened in 2007 during the Islamic month of Ramadan. It was named after Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, the founder and first president of the UAE, who is buried there.

The mosque can accommodate 41.000 worshipers, while its main hall can accommodate up to 9.000. Two adjacent prayer halls, each accommodating up to 1.500 worshippers, are exclusively for women. The mosque has four minarets, in the four corners of the mosque, which rise to a height of about 115 meters. Its 57 domes are decorated with marble, and the courtyard is paved with floral marble patterns and has an area of ​​about 17.000 m2.

Entering the Louvre Abu Dhabi is much simpler. There are no strictly prescribed dress codes or large crowds at the entrance. Unlike its "older brother" in Paris, you can visit this museum in detail in two to three hours.

photo: Robert Choban

"It took 800 years to build the Louvre, and only 10 years for the new Louvre to be born in Abu Dhabi," said the former president of this museum in Paris, Jean-Luc Martinez. The Louvre Abu Dhabi opened its doors for the first time in November 2017. On March 6, 2007, France and the UAE signed a massive intergovernmental agreement that loaned the name of the Louvre to a new museum in Abu Dhabi for 30 years. Namely, the price of building the museum was about 600 million euros, while an additional 550 million euros was paid for using the name Louvre. Another 750 million euros were paid for borrowing works of art from the Paris Louvre. In the end, it turned out that the construction project was the cheapest.

It covers 24.000 m2 with about 8.000 m2 of galleries, making it the largest museum on the Arabian Peninsula. Minor visitors (up to 18 years old) and seniors do not pay entrance fees. If you're taking a teenager like me with you, have them bring some document to prove their age. A regular ticket costs around 16 euros.

When you step out of the Uber into the spacious parking lot, the museum feels like it emerged from the desert. Its designer, the French architect Jean Nouvel, had the idea to put everything under a huge dome that was formed from 8.000 metal elements. It weighs 12.000 tons and is designed so that the sun partially penetrates into the interior of the museum.

We visited the Louvre Abu Dhabi during the May Day holidays, which are as "extensive" in the Russian Federation as here, so, as in our hotel, the vast majority of visitors were Russians. Faces and shoulders red from the strong May sun in the Persian Gulf, they looked at the ancient sculptures that the French took from Egypt and Greece two centuries ago and finally "betrayed" them to the United Arab Emirates, thus closing this bizarre circle of globalization.