the Fondation Louis Vuitton arts center

lv big one

This dazzling newly-opened center is located 20 minutes away from my apartment.  Designed by Frank Gehry, it’s in the Bois de Boulogne in western Paris. The iconic structure resembles a ship with billowing sails, what Gehry calls “from nautical to natural”.

lv big two

Here’s what Mayer Rus wrote in Architectural Digest –

Commissioned by LVMH chief Bernard Arnault to design a signature arts center for the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, architect Frank Gehry conceives a radiant tour de force wrapped in swirling glass sails

A dazzling center for contemporary art and culture, the project is the brainchild of Bernard Arnault, chairman and CEO of the French luxury-goods conglomerate LVMH Moët Hennessy–Louis Vuitton, and was brought to life by that most lyrical of architectural conjurers, Frank Gehry.  With its shiplike exterior of billowing glass sails, the 126,000-square-foot, 2.5-story building suggests an avant-garde update of the Jolly Roger, gracefully piloted by Peter Pan through the Bois’s verdant sea of centuries-old trees with a trail of pixie dust in its wake. Bewitching and majestic, the structure alights in the park with the delicacy of the Winged Victory perched at the head of the Daru staircase in the Louvre. Suffice it to say, it’s the kind of place that invites ecstatic odes and mixed metaphors.

lv big three

” When kids come to the Foundation Louis Vuitton
I want them to elevate their imagination,
so they grow up thinking of architecture differently “
Frank Gehry

http://www.fondationlouisvuitton.fr/en.html

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