A new glass case. The Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art, which is celebrating its 40th anniversary, is due to move into a brand new futuristic space in Paris at the end of 2025 designed by the architect Jean Nouvel, and whose construction site, already very advanced, was presented to the press this Friday.
This new building, 150 meters long, with facades that will be entirely transparent, was designed as “a journey into the future” and “a museum of the 21st century,” declared Jean Nouvel, 79, presenting his work.
Both cathedral and industrial cruise ship
It is located in the former Louvre des antiquaires, opposite the largest museum in the world and a stone’s throw from the Ministry of Culture, in the heart of Paris. Both a cathedral and an industrial liner, where trees seem to greet visitors through a glass roof on the ceiling, this new futuristic space is inserted under the arcades of a Haussmann-style building with exteriors classified as a historic monument.
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 installed, largely, on five mobile platforms whose design borrows as much from “that of doors -planes than in the theater,” according to the architect.
They make 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.
A project estimated at 250 million euros
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.
The Cartier foundation, whose collection includes 4,500 works by international artists, was the first in France dedicated to contemporary art. She was born forty years ago in Jouy-en-Josas (Yvelines). Ten years later, it moved to the 14th arrondissement of the capital in an all-glass building already designed by Jean Nouvel. It should move into its new space at the end of 2025.
