Birth Of a Magnificent West Parisian Vessel !
The Louis Vuitton Foundation opens a new cultural chapter, a new space devoted to art – especially contemporary art – a place for meaningful exchanges between artists and visitors from Paris, from France and from the entire world. By encouraging spontaneous dialogue, the Foundation seeks to inspire both emotion and contemplation. The Louis Vuitton Foundation invites you on a “journey into creation”, enabling you to discover its architecture and some iconic works of the permanent collection : from Frank Gehry to Gerhard Richter, from Thomas Schütte to Pierre Huyghe, from Christian Boltanski to Ellsworth Kelly, from Olafur Eliasson to Sarah Morris and Adrián Villar Rojas, from Bertrand Lavier to Taryn Simon and many more. Each of them is part of the dynamics. We are eternally grateful that they accepted to come along, from the early stages of the artistic project, led by Suzanne Pagé, who brought together her well known experience, inventiveness and the commitment of her whole team.
In 2001, Bernard Arnault meets Frank Gehry, the famous architect who won the Pritzker Prize in 1989. He entrusts him with the construction of a new building, for the Louis Vuitton Foundation, located in Paris, at the south of the Jardin d’Acclimatation, edging the Bois de Boulogne. Frank Gehry visits the garden and discovers an exceptional place steeped in history. He then imagines a glass architecture inspired by the Grand Palais and other glass structures such as the Palmarium, built in the Jardin d’Acclimatation in 1893. In the architect’s hands, the glass structure looks like a sailboat with wind-inflated sails. Twelve glass sails form the “iceberg”, a series of white shapes adorned with landscaped terraces and floating above a water basin. Shaped and curved differently, each sail is supported by a sophisticated display of steel and wooden beams, adding up to a total of 3 600 insulated glass panels. In order to fully integrate the building into the Jardin d’Acclimatation’s natural environment, the Foundation launched a landscaping scheme that revisits the basic principles of the19th century’s landscaped gardens. The building is connected to the Jardin d’Acclimatation to the North and to the Bois de Boulogne to the South. A real “dream come true” for its founder !
