CLIENT: LVMH ARCHITECT: Atelier Christian de Portzamparc, Paris BUILDING TYPE: U.S. offices for the luxury-goods marketer
LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton (LVMHY
), with its stable of luxury brands like Dom Perignon, Louis Vuitton, and TAG Heuer, wanted to consolidate its various New York offices into a flagship that would serve as a "cultural manifesto." It did just that. On high-profile 57th Street, LVMH's chiseled gem breaks the mold of lackluster, blocky towers that look as if they were designed by a city zoning official, not architects. Like fashion, the beauty is meant to be externally arresting. That means a faceted exterior melding three kinds of translucent glass to attenuate reflections of a nearby black tower while diffusing natural light inside. "This is a building that stops people in the street," says juror Gary P. Haney. It "has raised expectations about what architecture can do," says another juror, Terence Riley.
Get BusinessWeek directly on your desktop with our RSS feeds.
Add BusinessWeek news to your Web site with our headline feed.
Click to buy an e-print or reprint of a BusinessWeek or BusinessWeek Online story or video.
To subscribe online to BusinessWeek magazine, please click here.
Copyright 2001 , by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
Printer-Friendly Version
