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France

Fondation Louis Vuitton

Project description

The Louis Vuitton Foundation for Creation’s art museum and cultural centre is to be opened in Paris in 2014. It was designed by the Canadian-American Pritzker Prize–winning architect Frank Gehry, and has received architectural awards in both France and the United States. The building’s extraordinary roof takes the form of boat sails blown by the wind, with 3600 unique glass panels. These panels were individually developed, using design software specially adapted for the aviation industry, to fit the shapes drawn by the architect.

mageba scope

mageba supplied spherical bearings to support the internal steel facade while allowing movements and rotations. These RESTON-SPHERICAL bearings are designed to each carry vertical loads of 1400 kN and to permit sliding movements along one axis while resisting transverse forces. Due to the building sequence of the roof’s sail-like design, occasional uplift forces occuring during construction must also be resisted so the bearings feature uplift clamps. The choice of this type of bearing, with mageba’s special ROBO-SLIDE sliding material instead of PTFE, enabled the size of the bearings to be minimised – always desirable in architectural works.

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Schematic representation (exploded view) of a guided sliding RESTON-SPHERICAL bearing

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Picture of the construction of the steel facade

Key Data

Products:

RESTON-SPHERICAL bearings

Features:

Uplift clamps

Installed:

2013

City:

Paris

Structure:

Art museum

Architect:

Frank Gehry

Owner:

Fondation Louis Vuitton / LVMH group