Inside Fondation Cartier’s New Jean Nouvel-Designed Space

The opening of the new Fondation Cartier Pour l’Art Contemporain is one of the most anticipated events happening concurrently with Art Basel Paris. Continuing the legacy of its Rive Gauche venue—originally designed in 1991 by a then-rising Jean Nouvel—the institution has again turned to the now internationally acclaimed architect, and Nouvel has completely reimagined a Haussmannian building in the heart of Paris. The space, on Place du Palais-Royal, was formerly home to the Grands Magasins du Louvre.

Fondation Cartier will unveil its new premises during the art fair’s opening weekend with its inaugural show, “Exposition Générale,” which brings together major works from the foundation’s collection within a completely new, fluid display and exhibition architecture conceived to rethink and redefine what a museum should be today. Ahead of the debut, Observer spoke with Béatrice Grenier, director of curatorial affairs at Fondation Cartier, to learn more about the new space and how it reflects the institution’s evolving direction.

In Grenier’s words, this is “not just a move—it’s really a transformation of the institution.” Fondation Cartier will inhabit not only a new architectural space but also an entirely different historical context. “The contrast between the two sites is striking.”

In the early 1990s, Nouvel was only just starting to gain international recognition. He had recently completed the Institut du Monde Arabe and was already known for his innovative architectural vision. “With the new location on Place du Palais-Royal, Nouvel brings the full scope of his global career to the project,” Grenier tells Observer, noting that after designing museums from the Louvre Abu Dhabi to the KKL Luzern in Switzerland and the Pudong Art Museum in Shanghai, he is “not only a globally renowned architect, but one whose career has been deeply connected to museums and the dialogue between architecture and exhibition-making.” In 2005, during his exhibition at the Louisiana Museum, Nouvel presented what became a famous manifesto, arguing that the museum is a critical space for architectural experimentation. “In many ways, this new Fondation Cartier project can be seen as the culmination of that lifelong inquiry—his ongoing question: ‘Which architecture for which museum?’”

There was “an ongoing conversation with Jean Nouvel that spanned at least five years. He had long been familiar with the Fondation Cartier’s program and collection—he saw every single show at the Fondation—so he was deeply invested in rethinking what a new architecture for exhibition-making could be,” Grenier recalls. “He proposed this idea of a dynamic architecture for the museum, envisioning it as the future of cultural infrastructure.”

In this project for the new Fondation Cartier, the central challenge was twofold: first, how to modernize the historical Haussmannian building while respecting its 19th-century context; and second, how to invent a new architecture for exhibition-making. Nouvel approached these challenges as interconnected, Grenier explains. “On one hand, he sought to preserve and foreground the cultural and historical spirit of the building, originally constructed in 1855. On the other hand, he developed an entirely new concept for museography.”

Nouvel preserved the historical shell of the building—the façade, protected as part of Rue de Rivoli, a street originally designed by Percier and Fontaine, the same architects behind the Grande Galerie at the Louvre. He added tall bay windows that allow passersby to see into and out of the museum, creating a porous space that fosters continuous dialogue between interior and exterior, marked by the transparency characteristic of his work.

If the idea of a “museum in flux” has become increasingly common among art world professionals, Nouvel has translated it into an architectural structure, designing five platforms ranging from 200 to 340 square meters that can be adjusted to different heights. “This means the entire floor plan of the museum can shift and adapt, allowing each major show to be presented within a newly imagined architectural space,” Grenier explains.

Conceptually, Nouvel completely departs from traditional museographic principles. While museums are typically designed as a sequence of galleries forming a linear narrative, here that logic is overturned. “Everything that came before—Le Corbusier’s ‘museum of infinite growth,’ the white cube model, even the 18th-century palaces that became museums—has collapsed. At Fondation Cartier, we’re entering an era where art history is expressed through volumes, not just through chronological evolution. It’s a very exciting shift.”

This fluid space enables a highly multimedia and transdisciplinary approach, breaking down barriers between practices and fields of thought, as Fondation Cartier has done since its creation in 1984 by Alain Dominique Perrin, then president of Maison Cartier. “In terms of programming, the building itself almost serves as a prompt—it encourages us to think further about dialogue. Not just conversations between artists, but also between different media and with history itself,” Grenier notes.

The structure conceived by Nouvel, according to Grenier, can be seen as an evolution of Lina Bo Bardi’s pioneering “open floor” design for MASP in São Paulo, which introduced an idiosyncratic and plurispective approach to art history and museography. Nouvel had also explored this with his project for the Louvre Abu Dhabi, which intentionally disrupts chronology and hierarchy to create a transcultural journey through human civilization. Yet, as Grenier points out, Bo Bardi’s project “remained somewhat two-dimensional.” The Fondation Cartier aims to be more radical: “It’s not only about how art is shown but how the very structure compels dialogue between time periods, disciplines and ways of seeing.”

“The idea is to open the building, and through it, open up art history: to connect more deeply with the recent history of modernity, but also to broaden the traditional encyclopedia of art—the one symbolized most clearly right across the street at the Louvre,” Grenier continues. “We want to include a greater diversity of media, of voices, of exhibition methodologies. Diversity, in every sense, is the ideal.”

The inaugural exhibition “Exposition Générale,” curated by Grenier, will test these possibilities. Featuring nearly six hundred works by more than one hundred artists and creatives including Claudia Andujar, James Turrell, Sarah Sze, Olga de Amaral, Junya Ishigami, Solange Pessoa, David Lynch, Annette Messager, Cai Guo-Qiang, Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Chéri, among others—the show traces 40 years of art through the Fondation Cartier’s collection. Today the collection includes more than 4,500 works by 500 artists from roughly sixty nationalities across a wide range of media, reflecting the foundation’s long-standing commitment to supporting contemporary creation across disciplines—visual arts, design, photography, film, performance and science—often blurring the boundaries between them.

The exhibition design is by the acclaimed Italian duo Formafantasma, known for their experimental, research-driven approach that challenges traditional hierarchies between objects, viewers and environments, transforming exhibition design into a form of storytelling and reflection on systems of value and meaning.

The combination of Nouvel’s architecture and Formafantasma’s design allows for 360-degree visibility throughout the exhibition. The key question, Grenier says, was practical: how could this concept of dynamic architecture work in reality? “We asked them to design something that could be modular but also aesthetically connected to the history of the building,” she explains. “It was a department store for 150 years, which is fascinating, because Parisian department stores historically borrowed from the visual language of the Universal Expositions—placing technology, fashion, textiles and domestic goods all on the same level.”

The goal was to recreate that same sense of density and visual cohabitation between different artists and media. Formafantasma responded by designing modular structures—walls, pillars, textile wraparounds—that reference the building’s past while introducing a new vocabulary of display. “In some areas, you can sense a kind of Scarpa-like warmth and domesticity; in others, a more industrial rhythm,” Grenier says. “The exhibition itself becomes self-aware, performing a reflection on its own modes of display.” Ultimately, she emphasizes, “the way art is shown—the relationships established between the works and with space through their presentation—is one of the central arguments of any exhibition.”

Looking ahead, Grenier believes this space—like the Fondation’s previous home—will challenge artists to work in increasingly site-specific ways. Subtle changes in height, light, or proportion can radically shift meaning and perception. Since the late 1960s and 1970s—the “moment of realization” when everything became somewhat site-specific—artists have been deeply invested in presentation. “Today, all the boundaries between functions are more blurred, disciplines overlap and artists often move into curatorial territory, and curators think like artists,” she reflects. “So this transdisciplinary condition is exactly what the building both provokes and responds to. It’s very much a reflection of the contemporary moment.”

Grenier sees the new building as a turning point for Fondation Cartier—an institution that has reached maturity through decades of partnerships with institutions worldwide and long relationships with the artists it has supported. “The architecture Jean Nouvel has designed responds directly to a program that has always been international and cross-disciplinary—but that now promises to expand even further into what I’d call a kind of planetary culture,” she says.

Now directly across from the Louvre, Fondation Cartier occupies a symbolic position where modern and contemporary experimentation meet. Here, layers of history, architecture and culture intertwine to open art history to new transdisciplinary dialogues. It is, Grenier concludes, “a place for artists from all over the world, working across disciplines—not only in contemporary art as defined by the market or the fairs, but also in architecture, cinema, transmedia, science and anthropology. Together, these fields are engaging with the most urgent issues of our time. In that sense, this new building at the heart of Paris is truly a space built for the urgency of culture today.”

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Inside Fondation Cartier’s New Jean Nouvel-Designed Space

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