The Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, designed by Frank Gehry: ‘a decade in the making and of undisclosed budget’. Photograph:Justin Lorget/Corbis

In 1860, Napoleon III opened the Jardin d’Acclimatation, on Paris’s luxurious western edge, as a place where exotic animals could get used to urban living — or, rather, where beasts and the bourgeoisie could get to know each other in pleasantly sedate surroundings. The garden was also, on occasion, used as a human zoo, where black and brown people were put in living dioramas for the ethnographic “enlightenment” of visitors like Marcel Proust. Now a wild new form of life has found a habitat next door to the Jardin, and it will take some time to acclimate.

Frank Gehry’s deliberately spectacular Fondation Louis Vuitton — just outside the garden’s child-friendly (and now lion-free) grounds but within Paris’s enormous park, the Bois de Boulogne — is both exotic and local, a phantasmagorical museum emblazoned with a familiar logo. With its white body encased in a cloud of pearl-grey glass, it borrows the muted palette of the 16th Arrondissement, but its cornucopia of forms expresses an alien exuberance. When he first saw the site, Gehry told Vogue, “I cried because I could feel the history of the place. I had the sense that Proust had walked through these gardens, and I felt a responsibility to create a design that could be part of the incredible legacy of the park.” One contingent of Parisians responded by trying for years to get the project scuttled. Some critics wish they had succeeded......Continue Reading

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