Will It Be As Good As The Vuitton Museum?
Bernard Arnault, the owner of the Louis Vuitton luxury goods group LVMH, built a Paris museum for his own art collection three years ago, in a vast and stunning 11,000 sq metre building designed by Frank Gehry. Now, Francois Pinault, Arnault’s luxury-goods rival, is making his long-anticipated renewed bid to create a museum by renovating and restoring the former Paris stock exchange (pictured), the 19th century Bourse de commerce – one of Paris’s most historically important but least known buildings. The project, in which the Japanese architect Tadao Ando will install a giant concrete cylinder in the middle of the unique circular building, is so ambitious that Ando promised it would blast away the political malaise of the moment and soothe the wounds of Brexit. Really? We shall see.
