When Bernard Arnault, the chairman of French luxury goods conglomerate LVMH, was searching for an architect to create a building to house his vast private art collection, he remembered being struck by the fluid forms of Frank Gehry’s 1997 Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. In 2001, the pair met and, by 2006, the plans for Fondation Louis Vuitton – named for the Parisian fashion house at the centre of the LVMH empire – were announced, marking the first collaboration between Arnault and the Canadian-American architect.
Eight years later, in 2014, the Fondation Louis Vuitton opened its doors in the Jardin d’Acclimatation, a historic amusement park in Paris’ Bois de Boulogne. A spectacle in scale and form, the 126,000 sq m gallery was described by LVMH as a ‘transparent cloud’, its shimmering, overlapping ‘sails’ appearing as if preserved in perpetual movement.
