Frank Gehry Unveils Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris

World-renowned Canadian-American architect Frank Gehry designed a new art center in Paris, France, for luxury goods company Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy, called Fondation Louis Vuitton. Vanity Fair reported the $143 million art center opens to the public Oct. 27 and was commissioned by Bernard Arnault, chairman and CEO of the luxury-goods conglomerate LVMH as a contemporary art museum and cultural center.

According to WWD, 65,000 square feet of exhibition space will contain modern and contemporary art as well as original commissions produced specifically for the space. These items will likely be themed around LVMH products and symbols. The center will also contain spaces for research, documentation and teaching.

Fondation Louis Vuitton will "open a dialogue with wider audiences," said Arnault.

The building will take shape on the site of a former bowling alley next to the Bois de Boulogne's Jardin d'Acclimation, a large children's park. Suzanne Page, formerly director of the Musée d'Art Moderne of the City of Paris, will be the foundation's artistic director.

This will be Gehry's second building in Paris. In 1994, he designed the American Center in Bercy on the other side of the city. That curvaceous building was recently converted into the Cinematheque Francaise, a film museum and library.

Gehry, 85, continues to push himself forward, as Picasso and Wright did late in their careers. He has been experimenting with curving glass for years, twisting it into lyrical, dancing shapes. His latest project marks the result of a long journey that began with the glass panels decorating the cafeteria he designed for the Condé Nast building in 1999.

More than 50 years ago, when his career was beginning, Gehry spent a year in Paris working in an architect's office, and he discovered European architecture for the first time. He was struck by everything he saw, but most of all by the powerful, heavy forms of Romanesque churches and the lyrical lines of late buildings of Le Corbusier.

You can see all this in the Fondation Louis Vuitton: the strong structure, the soft curves, the whole idea that a building is a sensuous experience. Gehry has been exploring these ideas for a long time, but they have a particular resonance here, as if he knows how deep his debt to French architecture is, and he saw this building, most of all, as a chance to pay it back.