The Louis Vuitton mission for Las Vegas—the Maison’s largest American boutique—is outlined, partially, by the hanging structure of its setting, the Crystals shopping center inside the Las Vegas CityCenter advanced. Designed by the architect Daniel Libeskind, the five hundred,000-square-foot Crystals area is an assemblage of sharply angled, shard-like shapes clad in shiny steel, a daring abstraction that would appear, at first look, the antithesis each of Louis Vuitton and of Las Vegas. The Louis Vuitton Structure Studio created a design that manages, nonetheless, to narrate each to Libeskind’s hanging and insistent structure, and to the bigger context of Las Vegas. By day, the embossed metal panels of the primary, ninety-foot-tall façade, patterned in a rhythmic interpretation of the LV motif—and initially developed by French architects Barthélémy Griño for a stone façade—provide a textured counterpoint to the robust geometry of Libeskind’s kind, and reply softly to the desert solar. The identical motif is repeated at a smaller scale on an inside façade, dealing with into the mall, this time in a light-gold metallic end. At night time, the outside is one thing else altogether: 4 thousand LED fixtures remodel its pores and skin into a blinding mild present, an homage each to the adjoining Las Vegas Strip and, in a nod to the Maison’s French heritage, to the celebrated lighting of the Eiffel Tower. However right here, the dynamic illumination is punctuated by the whirling and spinning LV motif; altering from sluggish to quick, from twinkling to flashing, the venerable Monogram, lifted from Louis Vuitton’s nineteenth-century objects, turns into the article of twenty-first-century expertise.

Excerpted from Louis Vuitton Skin: Architecture of Luxury, revealed by Assouline.