The Louis Vuitton project for Las Vegas—the Maison’s largest American boutique—is defined, in part, by the striking architecture of its setting, the Crystals shopping mall within the Las Vegas CityCenter complex. Designed by the architect Daniel Libeskind, the 500,000-square-foot Crystals space is an assemblage of sharply angled, shard-like shapes clad in shiny metal, a bold abstraction that would seem, at first glance, the antithesis both of Louis Vuitton and of Las Vegas. The Louis Vuitton Architecture Studio created a design that manages, however, to relate both to Libeskind’s striking and insistent architecture, and to the larger context of Las Vegas. By day, the embossed steel panels of the main, ninety-foot-tall façade, patterned in a rhythmic interpretation of the LV motif—and originally developed by French architects Barthélémy Griño for a stone façade—offer a textured counterpoint to the strong geometry of Libeskind’s form, and respond softly to the desert sun. The same motif is repeated at a smaller scale on an interior façade, facing into the mall, this time in a light-gold metallic finish. At night, the exterior is something else altogether: four thousand LED fixtures transform its skin into a dazzling light show, an homage both to the adjacent Las Vegas Strip and, in a nod to the Maison’s French heritage, to the celebrated lighting of the Eiffel Tower. But here, the dynamic illumination is punctuated by the whirling and spinning LV motif; changing from slow to fast, from twinkling to flashing, the venerable Monogram, lifted from Louis Vuitton’s nineteenth-century objects, becomes the object of twenty-first-century technology.
Excerpted from Louis Vuitton Skin: Architecture of Luxury, published by Assouline.
