Fondation Cartier to Depart Jean Nouvel Building

Ten years after the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain was founded, the institution moved from its home near Versailles to a transparent, glassy building on Boulevard Raspail in Paris. Designed by Jean Nouvel, the building opened to the public in 1994, seven years after the French architect completed the similarly lauded Institut du monde arabe overlooking the Seine.

Punctuated by François Mitterrand's Grands Projets, the late 1980s and early 1990s were an exciting time for contemporary architecture in Paris, with buildings designed by famous architects from France and abroad opening annually. The year 1994 also saw the opening of the Frank Gehry-designed American Center, the institution that formerly occupied the plot at 261 Boulevard Raspail, having sold it to the Fondation Cartier in 1986. While the old American Center building was demolished, the old trees around it, including the famous Chateaubriand Cedar, were kept, fleshed out by the planting of additional trees. With its layers of ultra-clear glass walls, building and landscape effectively combined to turn the museum into, in Nouvel's words, “a phantom in the park.”

With such a remarkable building, today's news from Fondation Cartier is bittersweet, even though the institution is retaining Nouvel for the interior transformation of its new home that is currently under construction. For certain, the Fondation Cartier — explicitly a separate entity from the commercial Maison Cartier, per today's announcement — will be gaining more exhibition space, from approximately 1,200 m² (13,000 sf) at Raspail to 6,500 m² (70,000 sf) at Palais-Royal. Behind the large bay windows that face onto the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, Rue de Rivoli and Place du Palais-Royal, the existing Haussmannian building from 1855 will be opened up, including “the creation of layered vertical spaces which can reach up to 11 meters [36 feet] high.” The announcement further describes the creation of “five mobile platforms covering 1,200 square meters which can modify the surface area and the navigation of the building,” and which will be surrounded by walkways of a similar floor area. Artnet has a rendering of the interior and a photograph showing its construction progress.

While today's announcement from the Fondation Cartier says it will leave Boulevard Raspail “at the end of 2025 and start the third chapter of its history with the opening of new spaces on Place du Palais-Royal in Paris,” it does not offer any indication what will happen to the modern masterpiece designed by Jean Nouvel thirty years ago.