Frank Gehry to Design Vuitton Foundation in Paris

Bernard Arnault has hired the world’s most high profile architect, Frank Gehry, to design a major new cultural center in Paris’ most distinguished park, the French luxury tsar revealed Monday.

To be named the Louis Vuitton Foundation of Creation, it will be located in the Jardin d’Acclimatation, the corner of the Bois de Boulogne.

Gehry, who works include the fabulous titanium-shelled Guggenheim Museum of Bilbao and the DZBank Building in Berlin, predicted the building would be “a magnificent vessel in Paris that will symbolize France’s devotion to culture.”

Addressing a press conference in Vuitton’s giant Champs Elysees flagship emporium, Arnault said the foundation’s goal is to create “an exceptional bond between art and culture, taking up the challenge of daring and emotion.”

The 47,000 square-foot building, due to open in 2010, will be built in the northern end of the famed park. A model and drawings of the foundation, unveiled Monday, showed a rumbling storm cloud of a building with Gehry’s signature leaning silhouette. The structure appears to rise magically from the bucolic parkland from its location on Avenue Mahatma Gandhi.

Arnault stressed that the criteria for future exhibitions in the foundation will be his group’s traditional motivation: “classicism and a break with the past.”

LVMH, the luxury conglomerate controlled by Arnault whose stable of brands includes Vuitton, Givenchy, Fendi, Donna Karan, Moet Chandon, Veuve Clicquot, Hennessy brandy and Tag Heuer watches among many others, has been at the forefront of the link-up between fashion, luxury and art.

Recent collaborations between Vuitton’s creative director Marc Jacobs and artists like Takashi Murakami, Bob Wilson and Steven Sprouse, were highly successful partnerships between art and fashion, both commercially and aesthetically.

Vuitton company president Yves Carcelle stressed that the LV label had “always cultivated a close connection with contemporary creation. With the passing centuries, our company has reinvented itself to become the number one luxury brand in the world, a symbol of the French way of life and elegance.”

Inevitably, Vuitton’s future foundation will be seen as the latest battleground in the ongoing war with its French-controlled rival Gucci Group, whose controlling shareholder Francois Pinault is Europe’s great private collector of contemporary art, and the man who this spring opened Europe’s hottest new art attraction Palazzo Grassi in Venice, housing his own formidable collection.

Somewhat provocatively, LVMH’s press release argued that the Vuitton foundation “is also part of the art patronage tradition of LVMH, the leading private art patron in France, and Louis Vuitton.”

The foundation also underlines Vuitton’s unique standing in France as a symbol of French savoir-faire, respect for quality and, in the company’s case, remarkable success. Obtaining the right to build in such a historic location as the Jardin d’Acclimatation requires major political pull. No surprise then that both the Mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoe, and French Culture Minister Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, also attended Monday’s model unveiling.

The foundation will also boast a research and documentation center, innovative teaching programs and an original policy for commissioning artists. Delanoe also stressed that the key attraction was introducing the widest possible audience to the great masters of 20th and 21st century art.

It will not be the 77-year-old Canadian architect’s first building in Paris. He already designed American Center in Paris, one of his less celebrated buildings, which later, due to lack of funds, became the Cinematheque de Paris.

No chance of that happening with this structure: Vuitton is the world’s most profitable luxury brand, bar none.

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