At the exit of Les Sablons Metro station, in a well-heeled western suburb of Paris, stands a brown tourist sign that appears to have been misprinted. Next to the recognizable fairground silhouettes of merry-go-rounds and swings, advertising the nearby Jardin d’Acclimatation, is a mess of white blotches. If you screw your eyes up, it looks like a chrysalis, or a strange beetle. This way to the insect house, perhaps?
It is, in fact, a sign for the latest building by Frank Gehry — the Fondation Louis Vuitton, which has landed in the woodland park of the Bois de Boulogne as an avalanche of glass sails. Piled up in a staggered heap, these great curved shields twist and turn in the architect’s trademark style, their odd angles poking above the trees, visible for miles around. As if caught in a violent storm, the sails flare open in places to reveal an inner world of white walls, sculpted like whipped meringue, and a dense thicket of steel struts and wooden beams that have been forced into improbable shapes. For an architect often criticized for making “logotecture”, this is one tricky logo to distill — as the tourist board sign writers have already discovered.
“It is a vessel, a fish, a sailing boat, a cloud,” says Frederic Migayrou, architecture curator at the Pompidou Centre, who has organized a retrospective of Gehry’s work to coincide with the building’s opening. “It has all the metaphors of smoothness.” Sporting a glittering LV logo at the front door, it could also be a gigantic Louis Vuitton perfume bottle, smashed to smithereens.
Photo courtesy: EPA/ Ian Langsdon
Commissioned by Bernard Arnault, head of the LVMH luxury brand empire, whose personal net worth stands at US$29.5 billion, the complex is a palace for his collection of modern and contemporary art, a corporate cultural showcase. Built on public land with private funds, it will be given as “a gift to the city” in 55 years’ time. But like a loud LV handbag that a glitzy relative might give you from a duty-free splurge, it is a gift that the neighborhood hasn’t seemed all that keen on receiving.
It is a grotesque imposition in the eyes of some well-to-do local residents, standing as a brash monument to the fact that the country’s richest man can get his own way. Planning codes prohibit building in the protected natural site of the Bois, but structures are allowed under special circumstances, if they reach a height of no more than one story. A local campaign saw the project successfully halted in the courts, but then the National Assembly intervened declaring it was “a major work of art for the whole world” and must go ahead. A mysterious sleight of hand with the internal layout, using staggered “mezzanines” around a central atrium, means the building can claim to be just one story tall — despite rising 50m into the air.
In a 2006 documentary on his work, Sketches of Frank Gehry, the architect admitted he gets stage fright when his projects are finished. “I always want to hide under the covers when my buildings open,” he said. “I’m terrified about what people will think.”
Standing in the soaring atrium of the Fondation in front of an army of international journalists, as wayward columns heave to and fro above his head, the 85-year-old architect seems as hesitant as ever.
“It’s very hard to explain how I got here,” he says, looking a bit confused as to what he has made. “When you work intuitively, you can never be sure where you’re going. It’s like the improv jazz musician Wayne Shorter said, when his session musicians asked him what they were going to rehearse: ‘You can’t practice what you ain’t already invented.’”
An exhibition inside one of the museum’s halls goes some way to deciphering the free form way the building evolved — like every other Gehry project, through ad hoc assemblage, a kind of magpie collage of paper, card, plastic, fabric and other odds and ends. It provides a fascinating window on to the way his office works, with over a hundred models showing the progressive stages of the design, as clusters of boxes come together in a staggered horizontal mass, before being dressed with the billowing costume of nautical sails. Early sketch models show these glassy flaps floating effortlessly above the gallery boxes, while later iterations show the designers wrestling with how on earth these apparently weightless petals will actually be supported.
The answer, in reality, is a hell of a lot of steel columns and glue-laminated timber beams, thrown together in a riotous cat’s cradle of zig-zagging struts and brackets, props and braces. Reaching the summit of the building, where a series of roof terraces spill around the twisting protrusions of the gallery skylights, you are greeted with an eyeful of this stuff, a crazed indulgence of over-engineering — which required the development of 30 technical patents to achieve. It is certainly a spectacle, but it makes you wonder quite what it’s all for.
“It’s for artists to play with,” says Gehry. “Daniel Buren wants to paint stripes all over the sails, and I’m hoping children will do drawings that we can enlarge and hang in the space between the sails and the building. It doesn’t look finished, purposefully, to encourage people to interact with it over time.”
The terraces, he says, are planned to catch particular views — across to the towers of La Defense and Montparnasse, the Eiffel Tower and Montmartre — although it’s hard not to feel the views would be better without the sails and all their struts getting in the way. Still, with the many different stairways charting looping courses around the buffeted white peaks of the galleries, this rooftop landscape will be a kids’ nirvana for hide and seek.
Inside the building, the gallery spaces are curiously straightforward. They comprise a series of voluminous rectangular rooms at the center of the plan, around which gather the more quirky top-lit spaces, like little side chapels around a grand nave, where Gehry does his wonky thing. There are exhilarating moments, as at the Guggenheim in Bilbao, where spiraling stairs flow on to landings and views are cut through the different volumes, but above all there is an overwhelming feeling of lots and lots of empty space.
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