Frank Gehry's project of the Louis Vuitton Foundation for Creation

[ARA]

Is it a cloud? Is it a cocoon? Gehry's Paris museum unveiled

· £70m glass building to house Vuitton art gallery
· Project seen as snub to rival fashion tycoon

Kim Willsher in Paris
Tuesday October 3, 2006
The Guardian


An artist's impression of Frank Gehry's project of the Louis Vuitton Foundation for Creation. Illustration: Didier Ghislain/2006 / Louis Vuitton



From a distance some thought it would look like an insect cocoon. Its creator described it as a cloud. Many wanted to know what would hold it up and a few worried about who would clean it and how.
But yesterday all agreed that the enormous €100m (£70m) glass museum the American architect Frank Gehry has designed for Paris was extraordinary.
The plans for the building, a mass of vast swirling and jutting glass panels unveiled yesterday, make the city's other controversial edifices - the Louvre pyramid and the Pompidou Centre - look almost staid by comparison.

Mr Gehry is best known for the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, a swirling mass of titanium that has become his most iconic work. But even he had some difficulty describing the oversized glass conservatory he has designed as a proposed museum for the Jardin d'Acclimatation in the Bois de Boulogne.


"It's a cloud of glass - magical, ephemeral, all transparent," he said. It was, he added, "not stodgy".
"I wanted to create something that every time you approach, it shows a different character depending on the light and the time of day. I wanted to emulate everything this word 'transparence' means."

If built - and the project has yet to be given planning permission - it will almost certainly be nicknamed the Cloud, although it is officially the Louis Vuitton Foundation for Creation.
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(Artigo TheGuardian)
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,1886195,00.html#article_continue