The bucolic backdrop of the recently opened Fondation Louis Vuitton, set within Paris’s Bois de Boulogne park, inspired a garden building in the tradition of Joseph Paxton’s long-destroyed Crystal Palace. Like that famous structure, erected in London’s Hyde Park in 1851, Frank Gehry’s billowing new museum features vast expanses of glass.
Sacré Bleu!: High over the treetops in the Bois de Boulogne, Frank Gehry’s contemporary art museum for a French luxury magnate is an astonishing work of architectural couture.
Breaking the bounds of of Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani's master plan, Fabrikstrasse 15 by Frank Gehry stands in a surprising juxtaposition to the serene array of rectilinear buildings that dominate the Novartis campus. It is located at the geographic heart of the campus, in full view of the company's renovated 1939 Forum 1 International Headquarters building, and across the street from a refined stretch of porticoed offices and labs by Adolf Krischanitz, Rafael Moneo, Lampugnani, and Yoshio Taniguchi. The highly visible, independent site gave the architect freedom to exploit his expansive, free-spirited style. Relieved from many of the constraints binding the
Frank Gehry’s New World Center (NWC) in Miami’s South Beach, and Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles [RECORD, November 2003, page 134], are at once similar yet quite different.