Louis Vuitton Permanent James Turrell Exhibit - Las Vegas
Addicted To Retail (ATR) presents: the permanent James Turrell exhibit inside the Louis Vuitton maison at Crystals, CityCenter, Las Vegas, NV.
Crystals is the retail heart of CityCenter, Daniel Libeskind's jagged glass pavilion between Aria and the Cosmopolitan, and Louis Vuitton's maison is its largest tenant. On the fourth floor, past the leather goods and the made-to-order salon, there is a door that most shoppers never notice. Behind it is Akhob, a permanent work by James Turrell: two chambers, no corners, no edges, a slowly shifting field of coloured light that removes any sense of depth. Visitors go in socks, six at a time, by appointment, and spend about twenty minutes inside.
It is the largest Turrell Ganzfeld in the United States and it sits inside a handbag store inside a casino resort. That combination is the point. CityCenter was conceived as a cultural district rather than a themed casino, with Maya Lin, Nancy Rubins and Henry Moore on the public art programme, and Louis Vuitton used the Turrell commission to position its Las Vegas store as a destination for the art crowd that Aria and Crystals were built to attract. The store itself, by Peter Marino, is restrained to the point of austerity on the lower floors so that the climb to the fourth floor feels like a decompression.
Why it matters for retail
Resort retail usually competes on spectacle. Vuitton competed on silence. Akhob cannot be photographed, cannot be bought and cannot be seen without a reservation, and it has generated more coverage for the Crystals store than any window ever could. In a building where the casino floor is a few hundred metres away and the lighting is engineered to keep guests awake, a room designed to make you lose track of time is the most radical piece of visual merchandising on the Strip.
Louis Vuitton Crystals at CityCenter, 3720 Las Vegas Boulevard South, Las Vegas. Store architecture: Peter Marino. Installation: James Turrell, Akhob (2013). Visits by appointment.
Tags: Louis Vuitton, James Turrell, Las Vegas, CityCenter, Crystals, installation