Renowned French architect Jean Nouvel has completed his latest ambitious project in Paris, converting a 19th-century department store into a stunning new home for the Fondation Cartier contemporary art foundation. Located directly across from the Louvre on Rue de Rivoli, this transformation marks a dramatic departure from Nouvel's previous controversial Parisian project, the Philharmonie concert hall, which faced harsh criticism and budget cuts a decade ago.
Nouvel's relationship with Paris spans over four decades, beginning in the early 1980s with his breakthrough project, the Institut du Monde Arabe, a delicate metallic creation featuring mechanical lenses that regulate light. However, his last major Parisian undertaking, the Philharmonie, was widely criticized in publications like The Guardian as resembling "a pile of broken paving stones" and "a greatest hits mashup of dictators' icons." The architect was so disappointed with budget cuts and design modifications that he boycotted the building's inauguration, calling his project "sabotaged" and describing the concert hall as "counterfeit."
The new Fondation Cartier occupies an entire city block in a classic Haussmann-era building, a massive five-story structure of honey-colored stone with a mansard roof and colonnade. Originally opened in 1855 as the Grand Hôtel du Louvre, the building was designed to accommodate visitors to Paris's first Exposition Universelle, Napoleon III's answer to London's Great Exhibition of 1851. It later became the Grands Magasins du Louvre department store, serving as a bustling commercial center that shaped Parisian cultural and social life for nearly a century.
From the exterior, Nouvel's intervention appears remarkably restrained compared to his typically theatrical architectural style. The building is distinguished only by a discreet gold Fondation Cartier logo across the main facade on Place du Palais-Royal, resembling an expensive necklace. An elongated steel and glass awning extends down Rue Saint-Honoré as a modern interpretation of the historic colonnade, while the honey-colored stone has been meticulously cleaned and new elegant windows added at street level.
Nouvel's connection with Cartier dates back to the early 1990s when he first designed a watchmaking facility in Switzerland. He later created the foundation's previous home in Montparnasse, a crystalline steel and glass structure that subtly challenged the traditional "white cube" gallery aesthetic. That building, characterized by formal restraint and precision, opened galleries to gardens and the wider city, and remains one of his most celebrated works.
The interior of the new foundation headquarters has been radically reconfigured around five modular, movable platforms that can instantly restructure space and transform how artworks are displayed. These platforms, occupying the footprint of original internal courtyards, vary in size from 200 to 340 square meters and can be adjusted to different heights across three stories using cable mechanisms positioned at their corners. Retractable guardrails around each platform's perimeter prevent visitors from falling.
"Here, it is possible to do what cannot be done elsewhere," Nouvel explains, "by shifting the act of showing." This innovative system upends traditional gallery concepts, creating new possibilities for curators and artists to orchestrate changes of scale, juxtapositions, and sight lines throughout the space. The platforms align with the building's historical spirit, as co-curator Béatrice Grenier notes, playing on "the idea that the mid-19th century marks the beginning of mechanical modernization of the city at large: the Eiffel Tower, the invention of elevators, the integration of mechanical mobility into brick and stone architecture."
Much of the original 19th-century interior was destroyed when a Lancaster bomber crashed into the building in 1943, giving Nouvel relative freedom to redesign the interior. Massive concrete columns from a 1970s renovation remain, looming like archaeological relics within the voluminous new space. The architect, who famously declared in 1980 that "the future of architecture is no longer architectural," has created spaces that serve art rather than dominating it.
The opening exhibition, titled "Exposition Générale," revisits pivotal moments in the foundation's history through landmark works and key projects that have shaped its identity. The title references the fashion, textile, and accessory exhibitions organized by the original Grands Magasins du Louvre in the 19th and early 20th centuries, which were major cultural events in themselves.
Unlike the Louvre, which Grenier describes as "object-focused and encyclopedic, showing the world in terms of a material manifestation of culture," the Fondation Cartier emphasizes that "exhibition-making is at the center of culture, a succession of ideas elaborated with thinkers, artists and architects, and subject to constant change." While the Louvre turns its back to the street, the foundation remains extroverted and inviting, harking back to its department store origins with displays visible through street-level windows.
Visitors strolling along the colonnade can glimpse diverse works through these shop windows, from the ecstatic, colorful installations of Bolivian architect Freddy Mamani to the minimalist models of Japanese designer Junya Ishigami. The foundation's collection encompasses outsider art alongside established practitioners, with Patti Smith's work displayed near pieces by the Yanomami community of the Amazon, creating an aesthetic completely different from the Louvre's classical approach.
The flexible platform system accommodates artwork of all scales, from monumental to minute pieces. Exhibition spaces are complemented by a public cafe and lecture theater, the latter saturated in Nouvel's signature blood red color scheme, with walls, floor, ceiling, and seating creating a striking visual ensemble.
As Nouvel enters his ninth decade, having turned 80 this year, the opening of the new Fondation Cartier seems to fulfill his 1980 prediction that architecture must seek its sources in contemporary culture rather than remaining a closed discipline. Despite past controversies and the critical reception of some projects, the architect's latest creation demonstrates his continued ability to innovate and surprise, ensuring that he will indeed "always have Paris."
