Biography | Bernard Arnault — The Glass Sails He Opened in the Bois de Boulogne

On 20 October 2014 the Fondation Louis Vuitton was inaugurated in the Jardin d'Acclimatation, at 8 avenue du Mahatma-Gandhi in the 16th arrondissement. President François Hollande attended. Frank Gehry designed the building. The public doors opened one week later, on 27 October. LVMH's own announcement called the structure a cloud of glass set on a hectare of ground, with 11,700 square metres of floor and eleven galleries. The first cost figure circulated at about 100 million euros. In 2017 the weekly Marianne reported a final construction bill near 780 million euros. Both numbers belong in the record because the building is the most visible public work attached to Arnault's name. It is an entreprise foundation, legally separate, used for contemporary art the group and the collector already owned and for temporary shows. The site had been a bowling alley on the edge of a nineteenth-century pleasure garden. Gehry wrapped a concrete core in twelve glass sails. VINCI built it under a general contract that the contractor later described as an early large BIM job in France. For a biography pin this is the right last chapter of the working life as it stands. The man is living. There is no grave to walk to. There is a museum the public can enter on a ticket, in a park, on a date that is not in dispute. The foundation does not explain the 1984 takeover or the 1989 board fight. It shows what he chose to put on a skyline once the group could pay for a skyline. Photo: Fondation Louis Vuitton, Bois de Boulogne, via Wikimedia Commons.