Biography|Carlos Slim — The Aluminum Shell He Opened Free on Plaza Carso

On 29 March 2011 Museo Soumaya at Plaza Carso opened its doors to the public without a ticket price.

The official museum page and Mexico's culture secretariat both use that date.

A private ribbon a month earlier, on 28 February, had brought President Felipe Calderón, Gabriel García Márquez and Larry King into the same room.

CBS News dated that evening to the first days of March. Wikipedia's English page has the ribbon on 28 February and the public opening on 28 March.

The Spanish page and the secretariat stay with 29 March. The disagreement is on the calendar, not on the building.

Fernando Romero designed the shell. He is Slim's son-in-law.

Ove Arup and Frank Gehry advised on the engineering.

The tower stands 46 metres. More than 16,000 hexagonal aluminium tiles wrap an asymmetric frame of twenty-eight curved steel columns.

Interior exhibition space is given as 17,000 square metres by Britannica and by the museum itself.

The name is Soumaya Domit Gemayel's. She married Slim in 1966 and died in 1999.

The first Museo Soumaya had already opened in 1994 in the recycled paper mill at Plaza Loreto, in the south of the city.

Plaza Carso sits on former industrial ground in Nuevo Polanco, at Boulevard Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra 303.

The wider development carries the same blended name as Inmobiliaria Carso: the first letters of Carlos and Soumaya.

La Jornada recorded Slim briefing reporters the day before the public opening. He put the work at on the order of 20,000 hours and said it had been built by Mexicans in Mexico during the 2008-2009 slump.

The collection behind the tiles runs from a Botticelli Virgin in the vestibule to a large holding of Rodin.

Admission is still free. Operating costs sit with the Carlos Slim Foundation.

This is the public building a visitor can actually enter. The fortune was assembled elsewhere.

The aluminium skin is how the city was asked to look at it.

Photo: Museo Soumaya Plaza Carso, Raystormxc, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: Imperio Reséndiz, Presidencia de la República, public domain.