Fondation Louis Vuitton - Table of Contents

Interior - Fondation Louis Vuitton art museum
8 Avenue du Mahatma Gandhi, 75116 Paris, France
Fondation Louis Vuitton - Official Website

Excerpts
Touring the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, Frank Gehry’s New Temple to Art
By Lili Rosboch
Pub. on Bloomberg Business, 10/17/2014

Like many of the Los Angeles-based architect’s previous works, the building is like a sculpture, an exercise in rule-bending creativity. In this case, the form has Gehry’s characteristic lightness and movement to it without losing the practicality of a museum space. Gehry calls it a ‘double building.’

The exterior, a series of layers you might call a wrapping, is made of prodigious glass forms of different shapes and sizes. It’s reminiscent of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and inspired by 19th-century glass and garden architecture. The interior, or nucleus of the construction, consists a series of linear, static white blocks intended for the display of artworks.

And the space between the core and the glass shell, “a living façade,” as Gehry calls it, is attractive and functional, as well. Natural light flows between the galleries, and you can walk from one floor to the other via outdoor stairs, never having to worry about the Paris rain. The ‘double building’ is, in fact, like a double museum: you have the art on the walls, and then through the internal windows you can witness the dramatic exterior shell.


Model illustrating the shape of the museum









The two-story structure has 11 galleries of different sizes (in total 41,441 square feet)























Voluminous 350-seat auditorium on the lower-ground floor ...
" Downstairs, a dazzling concert hall in the “prow” of Gehry’s ship faces the cascade of water just beyond it. The hall is wonderfully mobile—the seating (for 350 people) can disappear into the flooring; the raised stage can also vanish, and a sliding rear wall can open onto an adjoining gallery, creating a vast space for performance art, dance, or even the occasional défilé." - Leslie Camhi,  Why Paris’s Newest Art Museum - the Fondation Louis Vuitton - Is Like None You’ve Ever Seen, September 9, 2014






Artificial cascading waterfall




Photos and their arrangement © 2015 Chuck LaChiusa
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