Funded by the richest man in France the architect's art museum and an accompanying retrospective at Pompidou reveal the danger of big budgets
...the latest building by Frank Gehry — the Fondation Louis Vuitton — which has landed in the woodland park of the Bois de Boulogne as an avalanche of glass sails. Piled up in a staggered heap, these great curved shields twist and turn in the architect’s trademark style, their odd angles poking above the trees, visible for miles around.
As if caught in a violent storm, the sails flare open in places to reveal an inner world of white walls, sculpted like whipped meringue, and a dense thicket of steel struts and wooden beams that have been forced into improbable shapes.
For an architect often criticised for making “logotecture”, this is one tricky logo to distil — as the tourist board sign writers have already discovered.
“It is a vessel, a fish, a sailing boat, a cloud,” says Frederic Migayrou, architecture curator at the Pompidou Centre, who has organised a retrospective of Gehry’s work to coincide with the building’s opening. “It has all the metaphors of smoothness.”
Sporting a glittering LV logo at the front door, it could also be a gigantic Louis Vuitton perfume bottle, smashed to smithereens.
Work of art
A local campaign saw the project successfully halted in the courts, but then the National Assembly intervened, declaring it was “a major work of art for the whole world” and must go ahead. A mysterious sleight of hand with the internal layout, using staggered “mezzanines” around a central atrium, means the building can claim to be just one storey tall — despite rising 50m into the air. In a 2006 documentary on his work, Sketches of Frank Gehry,1 the architect admitted he gets stage fright when his projects are finished. “I always want to hide under the covers when my buildings open,” he said. “I’m terrified about what people will think.”
Standing in the soaring atrium of the Fondation in front of an army of international journalists, as wayward columns heave to and fro above his head, the 85-year-old architect seems as hesitant as ever.
“It’s very hard to explain how I got here,” he says, looking a bit confused....
Empty space
Inside the building, the gallery spaces are curiously straightforward. They comprise a series of voluminous rectangular rooms at the centre of the plan, around which gather the more quirky top-lit spaces, like little side chapels around a grand nave, where Gehry does his wonky thing. There are exhilarating moments, as at the Guggenheim in Bilbao, where spiralling stairs flow on to landings and views are cut through the different volumes, but, above all, there is an overwhelming feeling of lots and lots of empty space.
In the larger galleries, where lonely films are projected at one end of the gigantic halls, the atmosphere recalls the echoing chambers of the cultural palaces of totalitarian states — muscular monuments to regimes that have precious little to show off. Indeed, of the 11 000m2 across which the building spreads, just 3?850m2 are exhibition rooms. The rest is the in-between, free-form Gehry jazz space. It may be occupied by hanging artwork one day but for now it feels redundant, the excess fat of a project that had too much money thrown its way.
Reaching for another musical metaphor, Gehry says: “I told the curator, ‘I’ve made you a violin; now you’ve got to play it’.”
But one can’t help thinking that it might have been better for him to tighten the strings and tune it up a little first....
....
Across town, the Pompidou retrospective provides an illuminating stroll through the entire Gehry oeuvre, stuffed full of models and original sketches, that show you where this brilliant madness all began. It is an interesting way to trace the origins of the Fondation Louis Vuitton, like tracking a complex family tree back to the primal gene pool.
- 1. Ref: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0446784/