I have a distant recollection of walking all the way from the Gare du Nord to lunch in the Café Marly by way of the nineteenth-century arcades so beloved of Walter Benjamin. I tried to reconstruct this journey in reverse, starting in the Galerie Vivienne not far from Adrien Gardère’s office:-
I spent the day in Paris at the Studio Gardère talking through Adrien’s plans for the installation of the Royal Academy’s collection in Burlington Gardens. Of course, I am not allowed to say anything of what is proposed. Suffice it to say that it is a pleasure to talk through – and be talked through – a set of plans which are the result of so much careful and imaginative thinking about how and where the collection should be displayed, not just in the collections gallery upstairs in Burlington Gardens, but across the site as a whole.
Most of what I saw of Paris was the view through his apartment window:-
And the filing cabinets which he inherited from the lawyers who had been in the apartment before:-
Plans for the Fondation Louis Vuitton were drawn up by Frank Gehry in 2000. It then took a long period of gestation, including difficult discussions with structural engineers, before opening in the Bois de Boulogne in October 2014. It’s an incredibly grandly theatrical building, generously proportioned, with an excess of mechanical swooping over and towards the viewer and a series of roof terraces from which one can view the surrounding countryside:-
We went for a meeting with LVMH which began in the exhibition on the history of Louis Vuitton at the Grand Palais, drawn from its archive of trunks. It could have been a bit dry, but was animated by being curated by Olivier Saillard, the director of the Musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris, included relevant fashion, and was designed by Robert Carsen, who has created a series of intelligently theatrical installations:-
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
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