Despite its echoes of Paris’s architectural past, Frank Gehry’s latest museum project—the Fondation Louis Vuitton, opening this fall in the Bois de Boulogne—is like nothing the city has seen before: muscular and delicate, utilitarian and fantastic, a marriage of cultural ambition and private enterprise. Paul Goldberger looks at the genesis of LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault’s partnership with Gehry, and the triumphant result.

CRYSTAL PALACE The Fondation Louis Vuitton, which opens to the public in October, lights up the Bois de Boulogne.

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.”

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.

Gehry, who is now 85, continues to push himself forward, as Picasso and Wright did late in their careers, relentlessly determined that, however important his past work may be, it must serve for him as the foundation for something more than a mere dénouement. He has been experimenting with curving glass for years, twisting and torquing it into lyrical, dancing shapes, and here the long quest that began with the glass panels decorating the cafeteria he designed for the Condé Nast Building in 1999 culminates in enormous glass sails that are pieces of architecture in themselves, sumptuous forms that give shape to an entire building.....Continue Reading

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