Come what may, Jean Nouvel will always have Paris. The City of Lights has been the stage and stomping ground of French architecture’s vieux terrible since the early 1980s. Yet the building that first made his name – the Institut du Monde Arabe, a glittering, delicate, metallic creation inset with mechanical lenses to regulate light – is a lifetime away from the bemusement that met his last Parisian project, completed a decade ago.
That was the ill-starred Philharmonie, a gargantuan trophy concert hall, described in the Guardian as resembling “a pile of broken paving stones” and “a greatest hits mashup of dictators’ icons”. Nouvel may well concur, since he boycotted the building’s inauguration, dismayed by budget cuts and design tweaks (“value engineering” as it is known in the trade), describing his project as “sabotaged” and the half-finished concert hall as “counterfeit”.
Defiantly weathering critical opprobrium, Nouvel is an auteur who revels in creating architecture that is always theatrical and never the same. There is no le style Nouvel. “I’m not a painter or a writer,” he once said. “I don’t work in my room. I work in different cities with different people. I’m more akin to a movie-maker who makes movies on completely different subjects.”
So what are we to make of Nouvel’s latest movie: a new home for the Fondation Cartier, a private art foundation established in 1984 that’s dedicated to the accumulation, display and creation of contemporary art? It is now headquartered in a remodelled 19th-century building in the heart of bourgeois Paris, right across the rue from the Louvre.
From the outside, there’s not much to see. Occupying an entire city block, the building is a slab of classic, Haussmann-era Paris, a colossal, five-storey hulk of honey-coloured stone with a mansard roof and colonnade that yomps monotonously along the Rue de Rivoli.
Opened in 1855, this began life as the Grand Hôtel du Louvre, designed to accommodate visitors and exhibitors to the first Parisian Exposition Universelle, a world’s fair conceived by Napoleon III as a rival to London’s Great Exhibition of 1851. The hotel was then transformed into a department store, the Grands Magasins du Louvre, fuelling the demands of France’s emerging consumer society. As a teeming city in microcosm and forerunner of the modern shopping mall, it operated for almost a century, shaping Parisian cultural and social life.
In terms of kerb appeal, this must rank as Nouvel’s lowest-key building to date, distinguished solely by the gold Fondation Cartier logo discreetly strung across the main facade on the Place du Palais-Royal, like an expensive necklace. An elongated steel and glass awning, a silver counterpoint to the gold, extends down Rue Saint-Honoré, a modern version of the historic colonnade. The honey-coloured stone has been meticulously cleaned and buffed, and elegant new windows added at street level. It all has a tasteful, seamless, stealth luxe refinement, in the manner of an Apple store or five-star hotel.
Nouvel’s relationship with Cartier dates back to the early 1990s, when he first designed a watchmaking plant in Switzerland. He was then tasked with the more glamorous project of creating a new arts centre for the Fondation on a site in Montparnasse, down in Paris’s 14th arrondissement – social Siberia compared with the latest plum locale.
Nonetheless, Nouvel responded with a crystalline confection of steel and glass, subtly subverting the “white cube” aesthetic as the default setting for contemporary art. Galleries, it seemed, were no longer blind boxes, but glazed display spaces, opening on to a garden and the wider city. Characterised by an uncharacteristic formal restraint and precision, it’s still seen as one of his most memorable buildings.
For the Fondation’s latest incarnation, while being presented with an architectural fait accompli in the form of an existing historic building, Nouvel has still managed to indulge his subversive tendencies.
“Here, it is possible to do what cannot be done elsewhere,” he says, “by shifting the act of showing.” Behind the politesse and sobriety of the facade, the interior has been radically reconfigured around five modular, movable platforms, offering the potential to instantly restructure space and transform how objects are displayed.
Nothing like this has ever been attempted before on such an ambitious scale. It upends the idea of galleries as static boxes or an enfilade of rooms, creating tantalising possibilities for curators and artists alike, in how they respond to “the act of showing” and orchestrate changes of scale, juxtapositions and through views.
Occupying the footprint of what was originally a sequence of internal courtyards, platforms vary in size between 200 and 340 sq metres. Each can be adjusted to a different height, over three storeys, through cable mechanisms positioned at the corners. Retractable guardrails around the perimeter prevent visitors from plummeting to their doom. In line with the general tenor of the project, the platforms are not ostentatiously steampunk creations, but instead are rather soigné. Most of the time, you are hardly aware of them. Their inherent drama is as a mechanism for shaping space, architecture in the service of art.
“The platforms are very much in line with the historical spirit of the building,” says Béatrice Grenier, who co-curated the opening exhibition. “They play on this idea that the mid-19th century marks the beginning of mechanical modernisation 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 fabric was destroyed when a Lancaster bomber ploughed into the building in 1943, so Nouvel had a relatively free hand to gut the interior. Still standing are a row of massive concrete columns, left over from a previous remodelling in the 1970s, which now loom like archaeological relics within the voluminous space.
To inaugurate its new home, the Fondation will revisit pivotal moments in its history, through landmark works, fragments of exhibitions and the key projects that have shaped and consolidated its identity. The show’s title, Exposition Générale, alludes to exhibitions of the latest fashions, textiles, appliances and accoutrements – highly anticipated cultural events in themselves – that were organised by the Grands Magasins du Louvre in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
The same visual connectivity, experiential richness and concern with display that enabled the building to play such a significant role in Parisian cultural life are reprised in Nouvel’s transformation. In many ways, Andy Warhol’s famous dictum that “all department stores will become museums” has come to pass.
“The Louvre,” says Grenier, “is object-focused and encyclopaedic, showing the world in terms of a material manifestation of culture. We’re saying something very different: that exhibition-making is at the centre of culture, a succession of ideas elaborated with thinkers, artists and architects, and subject to constant change.”
The Louvre also turns its back on the street. From the Rue de Rivoli, passersby might catch a glimpse of the backsides of sculptures through the odd window. The Fondation, by contrast, is extroverted and inviting, harking back to its origins as a grand magasin. Strolling along the colonnade, people can enjoy its displays through what were, and still are, shop windows.
From this vantage point, you might be drawn to the ecstatic, chromatic installations of Bolivian architect Freddy Mamani or the minimalist maquettes of Japanese designer Junya Ishigami. The spectrum of creation encompasses outsider art and work by established practitioners (Patti Smith rubbing shoulders with the Yanomami community of the Amazon), connecting visitors to an aesthetic and mindset that could not be more divergent from the repository of France’s national treasures.
The flexibility of the platforms means that all scales, from the monumental to the minute, can be easily accommodated. Exhibition spaces are augmented by a public cafe and lecture theatre, the latter saturated in Nouvel’s signature blood red; walls, floor, ceiling and seating as an eye-poppingly incarnadine ensemble.
Architects are fond of gnomic pronouncements. “The future of architecture,” declared Nouvel in 1980, “is no longer architectural.” Though sounding suitably abstruse, it simply meant that, rather than remaining a closed discipline, “architecture needed to seek its sources in the culture of today”. Now, as Nouvel enters his ninth decade having turned 80 this year, and the Fondation Cartier opens its doors, it seems curiously apt. And he’ll still always have Paris.
