created in Paris by architect Frank Gehry
October 27 was Erica's birthday. It was also Opening Day for the Foundation Louis Vuitton, the Frank Gehry designed museum in the large park in west Paris, Bois de Bologne.
We set off for the woods of Bois de Bologne that day for a long hike through the park. One of our stops was at the magnificent structure of the museum. With the mob of first-day visitors queuing up, we had no intent on visiting the museum that day.
We returned on November 5 with our cousins Erica and Larry, who were visiting from San Francisco. This time we came prepared with tickets purchased online. What we saw on that brisk, clear, beautiful day took our breath away.
reflecting pool before the waterfall
(see waterfall below)
reflections of a residential community
just outside the park
The brainchild of the French luxury-goods conglomerate Bernard Arnault, the contemporary art museum required court battles, an act of the National Assembly, and $143 million to create. Architectural Digest calls it a “bewitching and majestic…shiplike bellowing of glass sails…that alights in the park with the…delicacy of Winged Victory”. The art critic for The Guardian was far less impressed, dismissing Gehry’s masterpiece as a “mess of white blotches…sculpted like whipped meringue…a thicket of steel struts and wooden beams forced into improbable shapes” that look “like a chrysalis or a strange beetle”.
We agree with the critic from Architectural Digest. Look at our photographs and links and judge for yourself.
Perhaps most interesting was the framing of the the city though the glass shell, and the large video displays that could be seen within the lower levels of the museum.
Tour Montparnasse behind Tour First
The Eiffel Tower
aerial views captured from a video displays
in the lower level of the museum
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