A New Art Palace Sets Sail in Paris

A look at Frank Gehry’s new museum, Fondation Louis Vuitton, inspired by the Grand Palais and his love of yachting.

Fondation Louis Vuitton in the Bois de Boulogne Photo:Bruno Morandi/Corbis

text by Joel Henning

As you approach Frank Gehry’s monumental structure on the edge of Paris in the verdant Bois de Boulogne, you first see a billowing array of glass panels joined together like a three-dimensional collage, very much suggesting a ship under sail, an illusion reinforced by the sunken reflecting pool fed by a ground-level cascading fountain. Here, glass becomes Mr. Gehry’s defining material, molded in a wholly novel way. The architect of the titanium Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain and the stainless-steel Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles has found yet another way—entirely new—to make our jaws drop, inspired in part by his love of yachting and in part by the monumental barrel-vaulted glass roof of Paris’s Grand Palais exhibition hall off the Champs-Élysées.

This is the Fondation Louis Vuitton, built by LVMH, the company whose luxury brands include Louis Vuitton and Moët Hennessy, as well as Dior, Fendi, Bulgari, Donna Karan, Givenchy and a few dozen others. LVMH may well be the ideal client for this structure, perhaps the most self-conscious work of architecture designed to house art since Frank Lloyd Wright’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum on New York’s Fifth Avenue. 

The 3,600 glass panels are each unique—shaped in kilns specially developed for the job. Each contains white ceramic dots to temper the sun’s heat. And then there is the museum itself, a complex structure encompassed by the glass sails and constructed mainly of Ductal, an ultra-high-performance concrete.

The building’s 3,600 glass panels are each unique—shaped in kilns specially developed for the job. Photo:Bruno Morandi/Corbis

Several early critics couldn’t resist the urge to knock a “starchitect” of Mr. Gehry’s popularity working for a luxury goods conglomerate marketing exclusively to the wealthy and those who aspire to be so. Artnet News described the structure as “The Sydney Opera House crossed with a blimp.” Others criticized the location, far out of Paris proper, and characterized the early exhibitions as mediocre work by big-name contemporary artists. But these naysayers missed much that is enthralling here. 

There is no way anything resembling this singular structure would have been allowed in the lovely, dense, over-administered heart of Paris. With the exception of I.M. Pei’s Louvre Pyramid of 1989, entirely enclosed in that museum’s main courtyard, nothing much that is new has gone up there since the 1977 opening of the relatively staid Centre Pompidou, designed by Richard Rodgers and Renzo Piano. Just this week a French appeals court blocked the modest renovations proposed by LVMH to the abandoned La Samaritaine Department Store. LVMH plans to appeal......Continue Reading

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