‘You have to be courageous and experimental’: inside Fondation Cartier’s new home

In 1984, the French sculptor César told Cartier president Alain Dominique Perrin that it took public museums too much time to organise exhibitions. So Perrin decided to create the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, where decisions would be made quickly and artists given total freedom. That year, it opened on an estate outside Paris, becoming France’s first corporate sponsor of contemporary art.

Ten years later, it made its way into the capital, to a steel-and-glass building on Boulevard Raspail designed by Pritzker Prize winner Jean Nouvel. Now, the pioneering institution is entering a whole new era, relocating to vast premises in the heart of Paris, with an even more radical renovation by Nouvel.

Inside the brand new Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain in Paris

Located next to the Musée du Louvre, the Fondation Cartier’s new home has a very Parisian history. It started out as the city’s first luxury hotel, opening in time for the 1855 Universal Exposition. High-end boutiques on the ground and mezzanine floors became so popular that the hotel moved out and the building became a department store, the Grands Magasins du Louvre (the inspiration for Emile Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames). It later housed an antiques mall before finally closing in 2018.

For the building’s newest chapter, Nouvel left the façade untouched and gutted the interior, freeing up 8,500 sq m for public spaces, including 6,500 sq m for exhibitions. ‘This project doesn’t impose contemporary architecture; it explores the possibilities inside the existing framework,’ he says. ‘The history of the place becomes an active material, a fertile constraint.’

Around the structure’s original limestone arches, he introduced concrete, glass and steel. Five huge mobile platforms in recycled steel span nearly the entire length of the building. Able to hold large and heavy works, they can be positioned in multiple combinations, from the floor of level -1 to the ceiling, 11m above, offering a startling diversity of exhibition choices. Pulleys and cables are visible underneath the platforms. ‘By making the mechanism apparent, we reveal the potential for transformation, adaptation, reconfiguration and change,’ says Nouvel, who refers to the building as a ‘support for inventions’ where every detail is meant to provoke the imagination.

Large bay windows on Rue de Rivoli and Rue Saint-Honoré, reminiscent of those in the Grands Magasins du Louvre, allow passers-by to see into the building, and visitors to look out. ‘At Boulevard Raspail, I wanted to erase the borders between the museum and the city,’ says Nouvel. ‘Here, the context is different, more dense, more historic. But the desire remains the same: to create porosity, visual continuity, new perspectives and resonance between the intimacy of the space and the life of the city.’

Overhead, three glass panels reveal trees planted on the roof. When the panels are uncovered, sunlight through the leaves creates moving shadows on the interior walls. But the ceiling and windows can also be completely shuttered, for total darkness.

‘This building that Jean created for us is the culmination of a particularly Parisian chapter of dynamic architecture,’ says Fondation Cartier director Chris Dercon. He’s referring to a period that started with the 1925 International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts, which celebrated avant-garde architecture. In 1939, Jean Prouvé was part of the design team for the pioneering Maison du Peuple in Clichy with a retractable floor and roof. Prouvé then presided over the jury that chose Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers to design the Centre Pompidou, conceived to be fully modular. More recently, Rem Koolhaas inserted four mobile platforms into an exhibition tower for contemporary art foundation Lafayette Anticipations.

Today, says Dercon, modern technology and greater ease in obtaining building permits make dynamic architecture more feasible than ever. While this expands curatorial possibilities, it also presents new challenges to artists and scenographers. ‘Confronted with such architecture, you have to be courageous and experimental,’ he notes, using the term ‘cubist’ to describe the new Fondation Cartier.

‘It is non-linear, everything happens simultaneously, so we have to imagine how to create spaces for paintings, or how to create isolation for works that need intimacy.’

For the inaugural exhibition, which opens on 25 October, design studio Formafantasma conceived the scenography to show off the artworks as well as the building, arranging the platforms to offer a glimpse of the whole space from one end to the other. In marked contrast to what Dercon calls the ‘white cube syndrome’, they employed textiles and paper to support the displays.

Entitled ‘Exposition Générale’ (taken from the name for the highly anticipated sales events held at stores such as the Grands Magasins in the 19th century), the exhibition contains nearly 600 works from the Fondation Cartier’s 4,500-work collection, acquired over four decades from shows it has previously commissioned. These artworks demonstrate to what extent experimentation and eclecticism have always been key to the Fondation Cartier story.

The participating artists represent a range of disciplines: among them are drawings by filmmaker David Lynch, a table made of miniature bricks by architect Bijoy Jain, an exuberant ‘salón de eventos’ by Bolivia’s Freddy Mamani, and a stone grafted with hair from Black barbershops by David Hammons. An immersive installation showing global migration patterns by architecture studio Diller Scofidio + Renfro is based on the ideas of philosopher Paul Virilio, who appears several times throughout the exhibition.

Architecture is one of the show’s four major themes, which seems apt as the Fondation Cartier’s new building enters the pantheon of remarkable spaces for art and culture in Paris. Dercon mentions a few – the Centre Pompidou, the Fondation Louis Vuitton, the Bourse de Commerce and, of course, the Fondation Cartier’s famous neighbour. ‘Being next to the Louvre, now that’s the greatest challenge, isn’t it?’

jeannouvel.com

fondationcartier.com

This article appears in the November 2025 Art Issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News + on 9 October. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today