Good news from Paris. Frank Gehry’s newest completed design, an art museum made for the owner of the luxury brand LVMH and built in the Jardin d’Acclimatation, was opened to the press today, and is soon to be dedicated by the president of France, Françoise Hollande. The Guardian reports:
When architect Frank Gehry unveiled his plans for a museum shaped like a massive glass cloud in the heart of Paris it looked little more than a few squiggles on a piece of paper.
Even Gehry, whose celebrated works are often cited as among the most important in contemporary architecture, had difficulty finding words to describe what he hoped to create.
"It’s a cloud of glass - magical, ephemeral, all transparent … it’s not stodgy," he told the Guardian back in 2006. …
There were legal battles brought by disgruntled locals to halt construction, and more than a few headaches for the structural engineers tasked with ensuring the building – with its 3,600 glass panels made in special ovens by the Saint-Gobin factory in Italy, massive wood beams from the Black Forest, and metal structure – would stay up.
"This project is a dream, so the first idea was to create a dream. I wanted to create a dream for Bernard, who has dreamed all of this. The idea of creating a glass building that is transparent, ephemeral, and like a cloud is difficult to achieve in architecture," Gehry wrote in the foundation’s first creative journal.
The building boasts an auditorium – pianist Lang Lang will give the first concert in it on 28 October, followed by Kraftwerk on 6 November – a stepped waterfall sourcing a moat, a restaurant and art galleries for permanent and temporary exhibitions.
On Friday, as colleagues heaped praise on Gehry, 85, for what was described as a "truly unique … and already historic building", Jean-Paul Claverie, Arnaud’s advisor, described Gehry as "the king of Paris today". …
Back in 2006, Gehry pointed at his squiggly sketches and told the Guardian that when the building was finished he wanted young people to look at it and say: "What is that?"
When you see the finished product, you may concede that it lives up to Gehry’s wishes. Check it out:
No doubt busy with preparations for the massive glass cloud’s opening, Gehry was unable to attend this week’s meeting of Washington’s Fine Arts Commission, which convened to consider his revised design for a memorial to President Dwight Eisenhower. No matter—the commission waved the design through a preliminary round of considerations, though it will meet again later for more extensive discussions. Some members of group are no doubt thrilled to have a celebrity architect of Gehry’s caliber gracing our sleepy little town with his work. After all, doesn’t his design, complete with an 80-foot tall steel tapestry depicting scenes of Kansas in winter, viscerally communicate "Dwight D. Eisenhower" to you?
It’s a wonder that the Eisenhower family refuses to support the design, that recent weeks have seen the resignation of two senators from the Eisenhower Memorial Commission’s board, that House Republicans have cut the Commission’s budget to the bone, and that there is talk of zeroing out its budget entirely. Yet the design continues its inertial slouch through Washington’s fine arts bureaucracy.
All considerations of the intrinsic value of Gehry’s work aside, is the man who designed this…
…really the man who should design a memorial for Ike?
