Frank O. Gehry has become one of the world’s leading architects, known for postmodern designs like the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris.

Louis Vuitton Foundation
The building of the Louis Vuitton Foundation started in 2006, is an art museum and cultural center sponsored by the group LVMH and its subsidiaries. It is run as a legally separate, nonprofit entity as part of LVMH's promotion of art and culture. The Foundation was established at the initiative of French entrepreneur and LVMH group’s CEO Bernard Arnault in 2006 with the aim to “Promote creation in the present by adopting a position of openness and dialogue with artists, intellectuals, and the public. Astound visitors by offering a multifaceted activity that informs, exhibits and showcases the works of the 20th and 21st centuries in an exceptional space. Move and surprise the public by exhibiting artists’ work in an innovative building, a model of emblematic architecture (…)”.



In the same year, the Foundation presented the design of its home, an ambitious building designed by Canadian-born American architect Frank O. Gehry and located in the Bois de Boulogne park on Paris’ west outskirts. The Fondation Louis Vuitton opened to the public on October 27, 2014. Your first instinct, when you see an extraordinary new building that looks like nothing you have ever seen before, is to try to understand it by connecting it to what you know. And so Frank Gehry’s new Fondation Louis Vuitton, in Paris, looks like sails, and it looks like a boat, and it looks like a whale, and it looks like a crystal palace that is in the middle of an explosion. Some of the innards make you think of Piranesi, and as you look up the stair tower, monuments of Russian Constructivism, such as Vladimir Tatlin’s fantastic spiral tower, might flash through your mind, just as you could stand in front and from one angle the façade could make you think of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Beth Sholom Synagogue, his great “Mount Sinai in glass.”



The Bilbao effect
But none of these comparisons matter in the slightest. They’re all correct as far as they go, but they are really only ways of postponing coming to terms with the fact that this building is a whole new thing, a new work of monumental public architecture that is not precisely like anything that anyone, including Frank Gehry, has done before. You could call it a 21st-century take on the Grand Palais, the wildly extravagant Beaux-Arts exhibition hall off the Champs-Élysées, and you could also say that it’s Gehry’s attempt to render his own Guggenheim Bilbao in glass.

But even these, which get closer, miss a lot of what makes this building remarkable, just as calling it a descendant of Gehry’s IAC office building, in New York, which is made up of billowing white glass that also always reminds people of sails, only begins to explain what Gehry has wrought on this unlikely site within the Bois de Boulogne at the western edge of Paris. But none of these comparisons matter in the slightest. They’re all correct as far as they go, but they are really only ways of postponing coming to terms with the fact that this building is a whole new thing, a new work of monumental public architecture that is not precisely like anything that anyone, including Frank Gehry, has done before. You could call it a 21st-century take on the Grand Palais, the wildly extravagant Beaux-Arts exhibition hall off the Champs-Élysées, and you could also say that it’s Gehry’s attempt to render his own Guggenheim Bilbao in glass. But none of these comparisons matter in the slightest. They’re all correct as far as they go, but they are really only ways of postponing coming to terms with the fact that this building is a whole new thing, a new work of monumental public architecture that is not precisely like anything that anyone, including Frank Gehry, has done before. You could call it a 21st-century take on the Grand Palais, the wildly extravagant Beaux-Arts exhibition hall off the Champs-Élysées, and you could also say that it’s Gehry’s attempt to render his own Guggenheim Bilbao in glass.



The deconstructionist architect
Upon Arnault's invitation, Frank Gehry visited the garden, and imagined an architecture inspired by the glass Grand Palais, and also by the structures of glass, such as the Palmarium, which was built for the Jardin d'Acclimatation in 1893. The building site is designed after the founding principles of 19th century landscaped gardens. It connects the building with the Jardin d'Acclimatation at north, and the Bois de Boulogne to the south. The two-story structure has 11 galleries of different sizes (in total 41,441 square feet), a voluminous 350-seat auditorium on the lower-ground floor and multilevel roof terraces for events and art installations. Gehry had to build within the square footage and two-story volume of a bowling alley that previously stood on the site; anything higher had to be glass. The resulting glass building takes the form of a sailboat's sails inflated by the wind. These glass sails envelop the "iceberg", a series of shapes with white, flowery terraces. The galleries on the upper floors are lit by recessed or partially hidden skylights. The side of the building facing Avenue Mahatma Gandhi, right above the ticket booth, holds a large stainless-steel LV logo designed by Gehry.



According to Gehry's office, more than 400 people contributed design plans, engineering rules, and construction constraints to a shared Web-hosted 3D digital model. The 3,600 glass panels and 19,000 concrete panels that form the façade were simulated and then molded by industrial robots working off the common model. STUDIOS architecture was the local architect for the project spearheading the transition from Gehry's schematic design through the construction process in Paris to building space. The consultants for the auditorium were Nagata Acoustics and AVEL Acoustics for the acoustics and dUCKS Scéno as scenographer.