Interesting excerpt in Vanity Fair article:
There are architects, and there are architects. And then there is Frank Gehry, the charismatic, Canadian-born wizard of swooping steel and glass. His 1997 Guggenheim Museum, in Bilbao, Spain, was as different from anything that had come before it as the Concorde was from all other commercial jetliners. When Vanity Fair asked 52 of the world’s top architects and critics in 2010 to name their favorite building designed by a living architect, Gehry’s Bilbao was the hands-down winner. V.F. architecture critic Paul Goldberger says that, with his new Fondation Louis Vuitton building, in Paris’s Bois du Boulogne, a structure that looks as if it could positively levitate, Gehry may have outdone himself. For his report in this issue, “Gehry’s Paris Coup,†on page 290, Goldberger took several hard-hat tours of the (reportedly) $143 million, 126,000-square-foot glass-enclosed museum, which is something like a 21st-century answer to the Grand Palais. “This building,†he writes, “is a whole new thing, a new work of monumental public architecture that is not precisely like anything that anyone, including Frank Gehry, has done before.â€
Goldberger, who is at work on a biography of Gehry, observes that, at 85, the world’s most celebrated living architect continues to push himself relentlessly forward, the way Picasso and Frank Lloyd Wright did in their own twilights, a notion that certainly strikes a blow against any sort of starchitect fatigue out there. And not only is the Fondation Louis Vuitton—which houses a blue-chip contemporary-art collection pulled from LVMH’s significant art holdings—a daring addition to the iconic cityscape of Paris, its opening in October will mark a bold new era in the artistic life of one of the world’s greatest cultural capitals. “Paris,†Goldberger writes, “has never experienced a marriage of cultural ambition and private enterprise of this magnitude.â€
http://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/2014/09/graydon-carter-frank-gehry-paris