Buildings
LVMH Announces Private Museum Designed by Frank Gehry
(archrecord.construction.com - 11/02/2006)
By Sam
Lubell
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| Image © Jean-Philippe
Caulliez |
Frank Gehry is designing a new art center
in Paris for luxury goods company Louis Vuitton Moët
Hennessy. The $127 million project, to be called the Louis
Vuitton Foundation for Creation, will be located in the Bois
de Boulogne, a large park just to the west of the city.
The foundation will “open a dialogue
with wider audiences,” says company chairman Bernard
Arnault, who initiated the project. LVMH already has an art
gallery on the top floor of its new store on the Champs Elysées,
and has hosted exhibitions at Paris’s Pompidou Center,
Palais de Tokyo, and Grand Palais. The building is scheduled
to open in late 2009 or early 2010. Sixty-five thousand square
feet of exhibition space will contain modern and contemporary
art, as well as original commissions produced specifically
for the space. These items will likely be themed around LVMH
products and symbols. The center will also contain spaces
for research, documentation, and teaching.
The building will take shape on the
site of a former bowling alley next to the Bois de Boulogne’s
Jardin d’Acclimation, a large children’s park. A
model of the project was revealed at a press conference early
last week. It showed an asymmetrical, hunched-over structure
with a solid core and jaggedly cut glass skin. The materials
making up this core have not yet been determined, says LVMH
spokesperson Jun Fujiwara. The company’s press release
describes the building as “a vessel within the trees”
that is completely open to its environment.
Suzanne Pagé, formerly director
of the Musée d’Art Moderne of the City of Paris,
will be the foundation’s artistic director.
This will be Gehry’s second building
in Paris. In 1994, he designed the American Center in Bercy,
on the other side of the city. That curvaceous building was
recently converted into the Cinematheque Francaise, a film
museum and library.
LVMH’s museum plans are anomalous
for Paris, where public museums are still the norm. Other
private contemporary art museums include the Cartier Foundation,
designed by Jean Nouvel, and the Maison Rouge, located near
the Bastille and founded by art collector Antoine de Galbert.
Arnault’s rival Francois Pinault, founder of luxury brand
Pinault-Printemps-Redoute and owner of Christie’s auction
house, recently scrapped plans to build a contemporary art
museum on the Ile Seguin in nearby Boulogne-Billancourt. Citing
bureaucratic delays, he moved his museum to the Palazzo Grassi
in Venice.
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