On the site of a former bowling alley in the Bois de Boulogne, next to the goat mountain, pagoda and enchanted boat rides of a charming children’s park, two powerful personalities meet. One is Frank Gehry, the 85-year-old architect from Los Angeles, the other Bernard Arnault, chairman and CEO of the LVMH luxury goods conglomerate, whose personal net worth is estimated at $29.6bn(£18.4bn). Together they have created a building for the Fondation Louis Vuitton, a huge white-sailed object, a detumescent Sydney Opera House, for exhibiting the foundation’s collections of contemporary art. A decade in the making and of undisclosed budget, it is built on public land with LVMH’s money. In 2062 the building, but not the art, will pass to the city of Paris.
Gehry is often burdened with the ugly title of “starchitect”, meaning a quasi-celebrity with a conspicuous stylistic signature which is applied regardless of function, context, sense or budget to grandiose vanity projects. This is unjust. There have been times when Gehry has let himself be abused in this way, but his buildings at their best are generous, thoughtful and responsive, with a high degree of attention to the ways in which they are built.
Arnault is a man of exceptional influence, with a clear desire to make his architectural mark on Paris, and a determination to get his way. His plans to renovate La Samaritaine department store, an art deco palace beside the Seine, have encountered fierce opposition. The Fondation, meanwhile, was successfully challenged by local groups dedicated to protecting the Bois, on the grounds that it broke rules intended to preserve the character of the park, and the project was stopped by the relevant tribunal. Eventually a special law was passed by the Assemblée Nationale that the Fondation was in the national interest and “a major work of art for the whole world”, which allowed it to proceed.
Approaching the front door, you are left in little doubt as to whose glory the building serves. It wears like a big diamante brooch the intertwined letters LV, glittering in the sun. All around are the dazzling white curves, palpably expensive, of Gehry’s architecture. The building is massive, dominating its surroundings. It is a coalition of brands, of LV and Frank, and looks much as if it might be a work of starchitecture after all. The question with this project is which Gehry, the serious architect or the hired signature, wins.
In the official explanation, the design is inspired by the whimsical structures of the Jardin d’Acclimatation, as the children’s park is called, and by the glass houses that previously stood on the site. Marcel Proust is mentioned, and the evocation of times past. The design is also said to serve two different visual experiences, the internal viewing of art and wide panoramas of Paris, Eiffel Tower and all, that can be had from its roof terraces.
There are multiple metaphors of nature and geology – icebergs, a canyon, a grotto – and the building stands in a sort of sunken lake, with a cascade of water descending into it. Then the metaphors mix, go from natural to nautical, and the glass sails come into the story. Twelve of them drape the rock formations underneath, in complex, multiply-curving shapes of a kind that require advanced software to make. Some provide shelter to the roof terraces but some just hover in space, objects of almost pure decoration, like the abundant nudes and cupolas you find in the beaux-arts architecture of 19th-century Paris
Some of the time, the Gehry magic is there. He has made a thing to clamber over and explore, a much-enlarged version of the playfulness of the children’s park. He achieves surprising and intriguing connections between a wide range of spaces, between intimate and grand, shadowy and expansive, art and view. The rooftop experience is exhilarating, apart from some obstructions, of which more later, and Gehry unsnobbishly directs attention to less-loved buildings, such as the glass towers of La Défense, as much as to famous landmarks. The gallery spaces are big and bold, but also believable places for showing art.
The Fondation’s auditorium is a great room, an emphatic enclosure that creates a sense of community between speaker and audience, but which simultaneously dissolves at the sides with the help of glass walls such that the interior feels continuous with the watery world outside. Coloured panels by Ellsworth Kelly, in primary colours plus green, set it off. Behind the stage is a tall object like an outsized hearth and chimney, which sets up an effective ambiguity between home and theatre.
Then there are the glass sails. Gehry tells me that it “couldn’t be a normal building, it had to be a park building”, which meant it “had to be diaphanous and float” and therefore covered in glass. “But you can’t hang paintings on glass” so he designed a solid building with the glass flying around it. Then “because I have studied Romanesque and gothic churches, I always felt that putting sculpture on the outside is kind of a French thing”, and he decided that specially commissioned artworks might go in the zones formed by the sails. He talked to artists he knows – Jeff Koons, Richard Prince, Daniel Buren – “they were interested in that… every one I talked to wants to do it”. The architect worked closely with Arnault in developing the designs, and he “picked up the idea and loved it. I like to jump off cliffs and try things, and I had a great patron with me. He’s ecstatic. He’s looking forward to playing around with it.”
The art installations are not there yet, and while they may prove me wrong when they arrive, I can’t see how the assertive sails make hospitable spaces for new art. Rarely, meanwhile, have I found myself wishing so much that a project had had its budget cut, and that the sails had been value-engineered away. They get in the way of the potentially delightful connections the building tries to make, and of the experiences of view and art. The contraptions needed to support them, the bolts and beams, are pervasive visual noises, as if the hammering and drilling of the building site were to last for ever. Whatever might be reminiscent of poor, delicate Proust is blasted to oblivion. It feels as if the magnificence of Louis Vuitton and the desire to celebrate it with iconic architecture have overwhelmed the rest.
Two exhibitions of Gehry’s work are accompanying the opening of the Fondation. In one, a retrospective at the Pompidou Centre, you can see that Gehry is a true creator, searching to make things with models and drawings where hand, eye, mind and heart are working together. In the Fondation there is a show of the design of this building alone, a simply amazing array of 100 models where you can also witness creation at work. Among them is a large study of the building beneath the sails, with the latter left off. It looks like the start of something terrific.
Everything that is good about the Fondation could have been achieved, and better, without the sails. It could be a magnified, adult version of the petit guignol of the children’s park. It could do its admirable job of making art available to the public. It could be fascinating, unforgettable and beautiful. It could be a model of corporate benevolence. It might even do these things without creating the offences to the Bois that led to the court cases and the special intervention of the Assemblée Nationale.
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