Raising glass to a dream
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Chinese actress Maggie Cheung attended the event. [Photo provided to 皇冠体育app Daily] |
The dream started 14 years ago. In 2001, Jean-Paul Claverie, who once worked in the French Ministry of Culture, joined LVMH as a counselor to Arnault. Claverie was so interested in Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao that he insisted Arnault make a trip to Spain to see it.
After canceling twice, Arnault finally visited Bilbao in November 2001 and a month later he had lunch with Gehry in New York to talk about creating a building for the Louis Vuitton foundation.
Arnault wanted to build a contemporary-art museum and cultural center. As a major art collector himself, Arnault hoped to reinforce the connection between the luxury goods houses of the group and cutting edge art and design.
Twelve large glass sails give volume, lightness and vitality to an assembly of white blocks, known as the "iceberg", which are the body of the building. Situated in a basin specially created for the purpose, the building looks are like a giant bird in the garden ready to take flight, or as Gehry says in the video, "like a floating ship".
"To reflect our constantly changing world, we wanted to create a building that would evolve according to the time (of the day) and the light in order to give the impression of something ephemeral and continually changing," he explains.
Construction on the building, which along with its contents will be handed over as a gift to Paris in 55 years, started in March 2008, and the two-story structure (the Paris government insisted that the building not be taller than buildings that had previously occupied the site) was completed in December 2013, with the landscaping of the approaches and the furnishing of the inside finished in spring 2014.
The exhibition in Beijing is the first in the Louis Vuitton foundation's "Beyond the Walls" program, which brings arts shows sponsored by it and art pieces in its collection on tour. After Beijing, the show will travel to Japan where it will be held at Espace Louis Vuitton Tokyo, beginning Oct 15.
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