Frank Gehry has signed on to design a new museum in North Adams, Mass., that will feature models of trains running around famous buildings from the last 150 years — including six of his own.

The proposed project, called the Extreme Model Railroad and Contemporary Architecture Museum, will be a few blocks away from Mass MoCA, which recently completed its third phase of expansion, with large-scale exhibits by Jenny Holzer, Laurie Anderson and Robert Rauschenberg. It will cost an estimated $65 million (U.S.) and cover 83,000 square feet.

The whole exhibit will be on one scale, with the roof of the building at least 12 metres high to allow room for skyscrapers; the Empire State Building replica, for example, will stand about 10 metres tall. The work of 71 prominent architects from around the world, including Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Sullivan, will be featured.

“We’re creating it with historical obsession and mesmerizing detail,” Thomas Krens, the former Guggenheim Museum director and a Mass MoCA founder who is spearheading the project, said in a phone interview.

Krens, 70, and Gehry, 88, have collaborated many times before, including on the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and the long-gestating Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. When Krens originally started developing Mass MoCA in the 1980s, he called Gehry to take a look at the space.

“When I first went there for the first time, I had this vision of a kind of a people’s Florence,” Gehry said of North Adams in a phone interview. “These empty buildings could become galleries for specific artists, and sculptures could be placed around town.”

Gehry confessed to not being a train enthusiast: “Model railroads are not something I was infatuated with as a child. We were poor, and we didn’t have the money to buy that stuff,” he said.

He has created a preliminary model of the building, but has not developed the design yet. “I don’t know what a model railroad museum should look like. It probably just needs to be a big warehouse, which I’m OK with,” he said, adding that he supposes Krens “wants something a little more visually active.”

Gehry was unaware that a few of his own buildings had been chosen by Krens for the museum.

“He didn’t tell me that!” he said. “I don’t know which ones he’s picking, but I expect he’ll do it all justice.”

The city of North Adams has submitted an application for a $5.4 million grant from MassWorks, the state government infrastructure program, and the museum has so far raised $2.5 million from private contributions and state grants.

Krens expects that the museum could double the number of visitors that its neighbor Mass MoCA receives, based on an economic analysis, and in the process he hopes to turn North Adams, not far from the Clark Art Institute and the Norman Rockwell Museum, into an overnight tourist destination. He estimates that the museum will open by 2020, and is also planning future development for the area — including a bridge, to be designed by Gehry, and a luxury hotel.

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