The Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art, which is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, is due to move to a brand new Parisian space designed by architect Jean Nouvel at the end of 2025. This project, already very advanced, was presented to the press on Friday October 18.
It is located in the former Louvre des antiquaires, a building dating from the mid-19th century which first housed a hotel and then a department store. The exterior facades have been preserved, the whole designed by Jean Nouvel will be inside. This new Cartier Foundation will be ideally located, right opposite the largest museum in the world, The Louvre, and a stone’s throw from the Ministry of Culture, in the heart of Paris.
Both a cathedral and an industrial liner, this new futuristic space will be inserted under the arcades of the Haussmanian building which will keep its exterior classified as a historic monument. It has belonged to Société Foncière Lyonnaise since 1995.
The Cartier Foundation will occupy level minus one, the ground floor and the first floor. This new 150 meter long space will be lit on the ground floor and along the entire length of the facades by bay windows. It was designed as “udo not cross the future” et “a 21st century museum“, declared Jean Nouvel, 79 years old, presenting his work.
Built with contemporary materials such as recycled steel and concrete, it will have 8 500 m2 accessible to the public including 6 500 m2 of exhibition space, largely installed on five mobile platforms.
According to the architect, their design borrows as much from “that of aircraft carriers than in the theater“It makes it possible to modify the exhibition surfaces and routes within the building, in order to create verticalities of up to 11 meters in height, explained Mathieu Forest, project director. With its concrete pillars, its metal cables, its voids and solids at the heart of a gigantic longitudinal structure, the new space designed by Jean Nouvel resembles a futuristic ship.
The new Cartier Foundation will also house an educational space with an area of 300 m2, an auditorium with 120 seats, a bookstore and a restaurant. The cost of this project, started in 2020, is estimated at “250 million euros“, according to Alain Dominique Perrin, president of the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art.
He adds that she should exhibit “between 600 and 800 works of art from the collection” which has 4,500, produced by more than 500 French and international artists, from pioneers like César to African painting, from Japanese architecture to Italian design and drawings by Native American artists, from masters of American photography to young people European visual artists.
Both a creative space for artists and a meeting place between art and the general public, the Fondation Cartier aims to promote contemporary creation and disseminate knowledge of it. She has already organized “more than 300 exhibitions in France and abroad” and welcomed nearly 1,000 “nomadic evenings” with artists representing all artistic fields, including the comedy troupe Les Deschiens in its beginnings, recalled its president.
The Cartier Foundation was born 40 years ago in Jouy-en-Josas in Yvelines. Ten years later, it moved to the 14th arrondissement of the capital in an all-glass building, already designed by Jean Nouvel. Its latest exhibition on Boulevard Raspail, until March 16, 2024, is dedicated to the Colombian textile artist Olga de Amaral. The Cartier Foundation should move into its new quarters at the end of 2025.
