The Cartier Foundation unveils its new setting a year before its opening

Gone is the glass address of 14^e district and its bubble of greenery! On the occasion of his 40^e birthdayat the end of 2025, the Cartier foundation for contemporary Art will settle in a new, larger and more central building. This Friday, October 18, the press was invited to discover the construction site of this ambitious new setting: the former Louvre des Antiquaires renovated by the famous architect Jean Nouvel (born in 1945), who had already designed the previous building on Boulevard Raspail, inaugurated in 1994.

Right between the Louvre and the Comédie-Française, a stone’s throw from the Buren columns, the Ministry of Culture and François Pinault’s Bourse de Commerce: the new location of the foundation, 2 place du Palais-Royalclearly displays its ambitions to become an epicenter of Parisian cultural life. After a decade spent in Jouy-en-Josas (Yvelines), then 30 years in the 14^e arrondissement (historic stronghold of avant-garde artists of the 20th^e century, but a little eccentric), the institution judged that it was time to push the walls (the lack of space was indeed beginning to be felt for certain exhibitions, including that dedicated to the artist Ron Mueck in 2023) and see bigger.

The old Louvre des Antiquaires transformed

“I imagined this place as a large and beautiful machine serving art […] A hive that is both pleasant to live in and magnetic, a place of daring which will offer multiple points of view. »

Jean Nouvel

The building, which will offer 8 500 m² accessible to the publicdont 6 500 m² of exhibition space, has a facade of 50 meters overlooking the square and measures no less than 150 meters long : “the length of the Center Pompidou! », underlines Jean Nouvel, to whom in the capital we owe the Institute of the Arab World (1987), the Philharmonie de Paris (2015) and the Hekla Tower of La Défense (2022). From the outside, the Louvre des Antiquaires, a Haussmann building with Second Empire style arcades inaugurated in 1855 and classified as a historic monument, however stands out with the old glass envelope and the contemporary spirit of the foundation. But the interior, completely transformedreserves surprises…

“I imagined this place as a large and beautiful machine serving art, which creates a strong contrast with the exterior architecture. A hive that is both pleasant to live in and magnetic, a place of daring which will offer multiple points of view,” reveals Jean Nouvel. The contrast is indeed striking: the interior space has been totally openso as to leave the Place du Palais-Royal visible from the back of the building.

A completely modular space

In this immense interior space surrounded by 1,200 m² of passageways, the architect installed a revolutionary device which “plays on the poetics of free theater and cinema sets”: « five mobile platforms of 1,250 m² in total, capable of supporting a weight of one tonne per square meter, which rise and lower like large elevators to a height of 21 meters – the equivalent of a Haussmannian building. Thanks to this arsenal “straddling the cutting-edge technology of military aircraft carriers and that of theater machinery”, space will be fully modular depending on the dimensions of the works and the desired scenography, with “verticalities of up to 11 meters in height”.

“The project combines both the heavy (the mechanics of the platforms) and the lightness for an opening to the outside,” explains Jean Nouvel. A glass roof was in fact imagined, on which trees are planted as if in suspension – a reminder of the old place, all in transparency and greenery. “The glass of the ceiling can be completely hidden for an effect of blackoutor partially for create a play of light available to artists and curators, which does not exist in many exhibition spaces,” explains the architect.

Works from the collection to inaugurate the premises

To celebrate the opening of this new address, which will take place “in about a year”, a inaugural exhibition “will retrace the 40 years of history of the Cartier Foundation through a selection of 600 to 1,000 works the most significant from its past exhibitions”, finally announces businessman and collector Alain Dominique Perrin, founder and president of the institution. A much-anticipated housewarming party! The fate of the old Raspail building, which currently hosts its last exhibition (dedicated to the textile artist Olga de Amaraluntil March 16, 2025), and whose Cartier foundation was not as tenantis in the hands of its owner, the Groupama company. Will it remain an exhibition space? The mystery still remains…