Visualising the dream

Sometimes design ideas appear in dreams or daydreams, produced by the subconscious mind. But whatever their source, ideas need to be visualised and acted upon, or they risk remaining fantasies never to be realised. To exemplify, this month saw the opening of a new museum in Paris designed by architect Frank Gehry, and commissioned by Bernard Arnault, head of Louis Vuitton. Shaped like a massive glass cloud, the building, nicknamed the iceberg, is a metal and wood structure with 3,600 glass panels. Says Gehry: 'This project is a dream , so the first idea was to create a dream. I wanted to create a dream for Bernard, who has dreamed all of this. The idea of creating a glass building that is transparent, ephemeral, and like a cloud is difficult to achieve in architecture'. The museum took eight years to realise, from initial sketches and 60 physical scale models, to complex structural engineering design and construction.