Gehry’s Fondation Louis Vuitton and UTS building are dreams come true

THE verdict is in: Frank Gehry has created perhaps his greatest masterpiece in the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris.

AT the age of 85, Frank Gehry might be expected to allow himself the indulgence of looking back on his many achievements. After all, he has won nearly every major architectural award — including the Pritzker Prize in 1989. He has honorary doctorates from more than a dozen universities, he’s built buildings in cities all over the world and is hailed, along with names including Frank Lloyd Wright and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, as one of the greatest architects of the 20th century. But you won’t find Gehry interested in dwelling on the past, no matter how illustrious it is.

“I have enjoyed a lot of great stuff, stuff to make you cry and I wish my father was around so he could see it — it’s that kind of stuff. But I don’t look back very much,” Gehry told WISH in his office in Los Angeles last month.

“I don’t have pictures taken of my buildings. I read some of what’s written about them and I have enough of a filter system … that somehow I get the most important stuff. The books that are printed on me — I don’t spend time with them. I don’t look at past photographs very much. I focus on today and going forward.”

Today, after more than 50 years working as an architect with his own firm, Gehry is arguably at the height of his career. For architects such as Gehry, retirement is not in their vocabulary. Lloyd Wright, Philip Johnson and Oscar Niemeyer, for example, all worked into their 90s. In part, that’s because it’s not until architects have the runs on the board that they get the plum commissions, and the sorts of buildings that architects such as Gehry design take years, and in some cases decades, to come to fruition. It’s also because architecture is not merely a career but a lifelong calling. Today Gehry’s name would no doubt be top of any list for the design of a major public building anywhere in the world and he is in the enviable career position of being able to choose what he wants to do.

Next year his first building in Australia, the Dr Chau Chak Wing Building of the University of Technology Sydney, will officially open. In 2017 his massive Guggenheim Museum in Abu Dhabi is due to open its doors. When it opened late last month, his building for Louis Vuitton — also a museum — was praised by critics as the most significant building to be erected in Paris since Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano’s Centre Pompidou opened in 1977. And these are just a few of the dozens of projects that Gehry Partners is working on.

Gehry’s name was not so much front and centre when Bernard Arnault, chairman and chief executive of luxury goods conglomerate LVMH, wanted an architect to design a building to house his company’s vast art collection — it was the only name. And to illustrate the point that grand architectural gestures such as this take time, the genesis of the Fondation Louis Vuitton dates from 2001. That year, Arnault, on the advice of his recently appointed special adviser, Jean-Paul Claverie, made a trip to Spain specifically to see Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. Arnault then, according to a report in Vanity Fair, decided he had to meet the man who created the Bilbao building. In late 2001, Gehry met Arnault in New York to discuss working on a project for a site that LVMH had recently acquired in the Jardin d’Acclimatation in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris. In 2005, design work on the building began and it wasn’t until 2008 that ground was officially broken.

The long process involved in bringing a building such as this to realisation means that, first and foremost, Gehry has to like the people he is working for. “You have to have a good feeling about the person who is talking to you. I liked him (Arnault) and pretty much from the beginning,” he says. “He’s smart and super-well-educated and interested in the arts and a very powerful figure and I knew he was going to get what he wanted. He knew what he wanted, and I like that because the determination meant that we were going to realise the project and I wasn’t going to be wasting time, which sometimes happens — you get caught in these things.”

Gehry was familiar with the area chosen for the building from his time living in Paris in 1959-60, and says the idea of designing a stand-alone building in Paris was like a dream come true. “I knew the Bois de Boulogne and Bernard took me to the Jardin d’Acclimatation (a garden at the northern end) which I didn’t really know. And when I went with Bernard, I thought of Proust. I felt I had stepped back in time to the world of Proust, that for a brief moment we had left 21st-century Paris behind.

“I read Proust like the Bible and I imagined Proust and his kids playing there, and so it resonated. And then the idea of having a building in the middle of the Bois de Boulogne is a pretty unusual opportunity and then having a determined client who has the taste and wherewithal to do something special … it just brought tears to my eyes. I could see it all at once and it was just overwhelming.”

As with most of Gehry’s designs, the Fondation Louis Vuitton started with a sketch that looks like little more than scribble. “I do tonnes of sketches and they don’t really make any sense until, well, until the building is built and then they make sense,” he says. From the initial sketches his design process involves building a series of models of the building. When the final model is agreed upon, Gehry’s team works with custom-built technology to turn the 3D model into detailed construction drawings. Gehry’s pioneering use of technology in architecture led him to establish a separate company, Gehry Technologies, in 2002 to consult on building and engineering projects with architectural firms other than his own. Earlier this year, Gehry Technologies, which has worked with leading architects such as Zaha Hadid, Jean Nouvel and Herzog & de Meuron, was acquired by California-based technology company Trimble.

Although Gehry is possibly best known for his buildings that are clad in shiny metal, the Fondation Louis Vuitton is primarily a glass structure. For the UTS building in Sydney, Gehry chose to work in brick because it’s the dominant form of construction in its neighbourhood. “The university, when they hired me, I think they expected a shiny metal building, and I made some metal models but they were things I had already sort of worked over and done,” he says.

In Paris, his decision to design a glass structure was a little more pragmatic. “You’re not allowed to build a building of this height in the Bois de Boulogne and so our argument for it was that we were building a garden pavilion like the Paxton (Crystal) Palace in London and like the Grand Palais in Paris,” says Gehry. “So when we showed the models of that kind of building the city approved; that made sense to them as being a park building. The only problem with it is that you can’t hang paintings on glass so we had to have a solid building (underneath the glass structure). But because of the glass, we were able to get more height, which allowed us to make the solid building better fit Mr Arnault’s program. It’s not that big, but it looks big.” The building, which has 11 gallery spaces as well as a 350-seat auditorium, stretches over 8600sqm with 3850sqm of museum space.

“It looks big” is something that could also be said of the cost of Gehry’s buildings. The Fondation Louis Vuitton building in Paris is reported to have been built at a cost of $US143 million (about $162m). His building at UTS in Sydney is costing $210m. A great piece of architecture, one that has the potential to reshape an entire city, doesn’t come cheap, but Gehry says he prides himself on bringing in his projects on budget. “I’ve had a variety of client types and, you know, I run a business as well. I’m not a super-businessman like Bernard Arnault, but I do run a tight ship and I understand finance and business and have respect for it … I guess it’s not really known much, but I follow budgets and schedules and all that stuff. I’m nuts about that. I’m fastidious about those issues because I know that those things are always important to the people who are commissioning you,” he says.

Writing in The New York Times in November 1989, architecture critic Paul Goldberger described Gehry’s buildings as “powerful essays in primal geometric form and materials, and from an aesthetic standpoint they are among the most profound and brilliant works of architecture of our time”. Gehry’s buildings don’t look like other buildings — apart perhaps from other Gehry buildings — and because of that they almost defy description. To understand them, people are forced to connect them to something familiar. An office building he designed in New York, the IAC Building, for example, has been described as an iceberg; his building at UTS in Sydney has been called a crumpled brown paper bag; a building in Prague for Dutch insurance company Nationale-Nederlanden is said to resemble a couple dancing while the Fondation Louis Vuitton has been variously described as resembling clouds, or sails or a crystal palace.

“It’s my cross to bear, why do they pick on me?” says Gehry, who clearly has a sense of humour about it. He appears in a 2005 episode of The Simpsons in which he designs a concert hall for the fictional town of Springfield by screwing up the letter Marge Simpson sends him. Then looking at the ball of crumpled paper, he says, “Frank Gehry, you’re a genius”. In the next scene the model of the concert hall is the same shape as the crumpled paper. While Gehry seems somewhat proud of his appearance on the cartoon series — how many architects can lay claim to being such a part of the popular culture? — and has his avatar from the show as the screen saver on his iPhone, he is quick to point out that the design process for his buildings is decidedly more intellectual.

“There is a certain type of building in France and throughout Europe, the 19th-century type, and you have almost the same kind of six- or seven-storey buildings with historical details and mouldings and frames and all that kind of stuff right through France and Europe. And then there’s the war and then there’s modernism, which cleansed everything and got rid of all of that and made it square and solid and minimal and feelingless, in every city in the world. And we yearn for some kind of feeling. How do you put feeling into a building? You do it with texture and colour and form. All I’ve been trying to do is get a sense of feeling and human involvement and response, and it kind of works.”

The Fondation Louis Vuitton’s inaugural program includes an exhibition dedicated to Frank Gehry’s design of the building and runs until March 16. A retrospective of Gehry’s work is also on show at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and runs until January 26.

Box bag with a twist

Frank Gehry is an architect with a playful sense of humour and appreciation for the fun part of design.

When Louis Vuitton approached him to design a handbag, he not only rose to the design challenge but did so fully anticipating the reaction of his peers. “The bag is playful, the experience of making it was playful but in a serious way,” he says. “I imagine there would be a lot of ‘establishment’ architects that would be snooty about me designing a handbag. That’s the best part!”

The bag Gehry designed is a limited-edition piece for Louis Vuitton’s Celebrating Monogram collection. The project was the brainchild of Louis Vuitton’s executive vice-president, Delphine Arnault, and its artistic director of women’s collections, Nicolas Ghesquiere. They chose six iconoclasts who were leaders in their chosen design fields and gave them carte blanche to design a bag or piece of luggage inspired by the brand’s LV monogram logo.

Along with Gehry, Louis Vuitton commissioned Chanel and Fendi designer Karl Lagerfeld, Australian designer Marc Newson, artist Cindy Sherman, shoe designer Christian Louboutin and Comme des Garcons designer Rei Kawakubo to design monogram pieces that will be sold in the company’s stores across the world. Gehry’s twisted box bag is possibly the most classic of all the items.

“The bag [I designed] is one thing where it wouldn’t have worked being bigger,” says Gehry. “You wouldn’t make a suitcase that is lopsided, would you? With a handbag you can get away with it as it sits on a table — that’s how I saw it, sitting like a sculpture … I have never really been inside a handbag, so I was trying to think what would I like if I was inside. I thought maybe blue — I just liked that colour in contrast with the monogram … I wanted to leave the attention on the outside. The interior is more private, and a darker blue just felt more orderly, somehow, that it would give the things in the bag more clarity. I suppose I just have a fantasy of what it would be like to be inside the bag.”

More: icon.louisvuitton.com