Louis Vuitton Foundation

At the edge of the Bois de Boulogne in western Paris, a cluster of curved glass sails seems to have caught the wind above the trees. The Fondation Louis Vuitton, an art museum and cultural centre designed by Frank Gehry and opened in October 2014, is one of the most striking pieces of contemporary architecture in the city. It is run as a non-profit foundation sponsored by the luxury group LVMH, whose chief executive Bernard Arnault first spoke to Gehry about the project in 2001.

Gehry found his starting point in the nineteenth-century glass architecture of Paris, from the Grand Palais to the Palmarium built in 1893 for the neighbouring Jardin d'Acclimatation. He also had to work within the footprint and two-storey volume of a bowling alley that had stood on the site, and anything rising above it had to be glass. His answer was a core of white, terraced blocks, nicknamed the iceberg and clad in fibre-reinforced concrete, wrapped in twelve sails made from about 3,600 individually curved panels of laminated glass. Hundreds of designers and engineers worked on a single shared digital model, adapted from aircraft-design software, and robots moulded the façade panels directly from it. Building began in 2008 and the sails went up in 2012, after court challenges over the site in a protected park were settled.

Inside are eleven galleries of varying sizes, lit from above by partly hidden skylights, along with a 350-seat auditorium and roof terraces that open onto views across the woods towards the city. The collection draws on works associated with LVMH and Bernard Arnault, including pieces by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Gilbert & George and Jeff Koons, and the foundation commissioned site-specific works for the building: Ellsworth Kelly's twelve-band coloured curtain for the auditorium and Olafur Eliasson's Inside the Horizon, a walkway lined with 43 glowing yellow prism columns. The building is due to pass to the City of Paris after 55 years.

Getting there

The foundation stands in the Bois de Boulogne, in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, beside the Jardin d'Acclimatation and about 1 km from the centre of Neuilly-sur-Seine. The nearest Métro station is Les Sablons on Line 1. The nearest airport is Paris-Orly (ORY), about 18 km to the south-east.