Biomuseo

This guide to the Biomuseo in Panama City opens with a puzzle: why would a new president freeze funding for a building already half finished. Ground broke in 2005 on Frank Gehry's jumble of colored roof panels, budgeted at sixty million dollars, but the checks stopped the moment Ricardo Martinelli took office in 2009, leaving cranes idle over an unfinished skeleton. You'll hear from a former museum official about restarting the funding fight with each new administration, across four separate governments, while the price climbed past seventy, then eighty, then ninety million. The guide also follows the construction crews who had to scale Gehry's sloped, asymmetrical roof wearing mountain-climbing gear.