The Louis Vuitton Foundation (French: Fondation d'entreprise Louis-Vuitton), previously Louis Vuitton Foundation for Creation (Fondation Louis-Vuitton pour la création), is a French art museum and cultural center sponsored by the group LVMH and its subsidiaries. It is run as a legally separate, nonprofit entity as part of LVMH's promotion of art and culture. The art museum opened on October 20, 2014, in the presence of President François Hollande. The Deconstructivist building was designed by American architect Frank Gehry, with groundwork starting in 2006. It is adjacent to the Jardin d'Acclimatation in the Bois de Boulogne of the 16th arrondissement of Paris, bordering on Neuilly-sur-Seine. More than 1.4 million people visited the Louis Vuitton Foundation in 2017.
The actual cost of the museum, initially projected to be €100 million, was revealed in 2017 to have been nearly eight times that sum. A November 2018 report of the Court of Audit indicated that from 2007 to 2014, building construction constituted the main activity of the Foundation. Earlier that month, FRICC, a French anti-corruption group, filed a complaint in court in Paris accusing the Louis Vuitton Foundation of committing fraud and tax evasion in the construction of its museum. It claimed the nonprofit branch of the LVMH conglomerate was able to deduct about 60% of the cost of the museum from its taxes and request tax refunds on some other costs. In all, FRICC claimed LVMH and the Louis Vuitton Foundation received nearly €603 million from the government toward the nearly €790 million construction costs of the museum. In September 2019, the case was dismissed.
History
In 2001, Bernard Arnault, CEO of LVMH, met architect Frank Gehry. He told him of plans for a new building for the Louis Vuitton Foundation for Creation on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne. The building project was first presented in 2006, with costs estimated at €100 million ($127 million) and plans to open in late 2009 or early 2010. Suzanne Pagé, then director of the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, was named the foundation's artistic director in charge of developing the museum's program.
The city of Paris which owns the park granted a building permit in 2007. In 2011, an association for the safeguard of the Bois de Boulogne won a court battle, as the judge ruled the centre had been built too close to a tiny asphalt road deemed a public right of way. Opponents to the site had also complained that a new building would disrupt the verdant peace of the historic park. The city appealed the court decision. Renowned French architect Jean Nouvel backed Gehry and said of the objectors: "With their little tight-fitting suits, they want to put Paris in formalin. It's quite pathetic." Eventually a special law was passed by the Assemblée Nationale that the Foundation was in the national interest and "a major work of art for the whole world", which allowed it to proceed.
The museum opened to the public in October, at a reported cost of $143 million. However, in May 2017, Marianne, a French news magazine, revealed that the final cost of the building had been €780 million (close to $900 million).
Before the official opening, it provided the venue for Louis Vuitton’s women’s spring/summer 2015 fashion show.
Architecture
Design
Upon Arnault's invitation, Frank Gehry visited the garden, and imagined an architecture inspired by the glass Grand Palais, and also by the structures of glass, such as the Palmarium, which was built for the Jardin d'Acclimatation in 1893. The building site is designed after the founding principles of 19th century landscaped gardens. It connects the building with the Jardin d'Acclimatation at north, and the Bois de Boulogne to the south.
The two-story structure has 11 galleries of different sizes (in total 41,441 square feet), a voluminous 350-seat auditorium on the lower-ground floor and multilevel roof terraces for events and art installations. Gehry had to build within the square footage and two-story volume of a bowling alley that previously stood on the site; anything higher had to be glass. The resulting glass building takes the form of a sailboat's sails inflated by the wind. These glass sails envelop the "iceberg", a series of shapes with white, flowery terraces.
The galleries on the upper floors are lit by recessed or partially hidden skylights.
The side of the building facing Avenue Mahatma Gandhi, right above the ticket booth, holds a large stainless-steel LV logo designed by Gehry.
