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“I would say we’ve left behind the humanist and artistic side of the architect’s role,” muses Jean Nouvel, when asked what has changed in the relationship between art and architecture these past 30 years. He is speaking inside the walls of his new Fondation Cartier, which replaces the celebrated boulevard Raspail building he completed for the contemporary-art incubator back in 1994. Offered the chance of five times the space in the heart of Paris, the foundation had no qualms about abandoning its out-of-the-way glass gazebo, however much Nouvel’s enigmatically diaphanous building had contributed to its avant-garde aura. Only a tenant in its tranquil Left Bank garden, the Fondation Cartier now joins a very select Right Bank club: directly opposite the Louvre, it is within walking distance of the Musée d’Orsay, the Collection Pinault, and the Centre Pompidou, to name just the biggest players.

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The arches of the stone building’s facade (top of page) are carried over to the interior (1), where countless configurations of display space are possible (2). Photos © Martin Argyroglo (1), Cyril Marcilhacy (2), click to enlarge.

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All in stone, on a busy treeless square, the foundation’s new home couldn’t contrast more with the old. Completed by Alfred Armand in 1855, and filling an entire city block on the rue de Rivoli, the building began life as a 700-bedroom hotel, housed a department store—the Grand Magasin du Louvre—for eight decades, then morphed into an antiques mall. With facades that mimic Percier and Fontaine’s design for the initial stretch of the street, it features ground-floor arcades all around its perimeter. The Fondation Cartier has leased the basement and first two floors, from which Nouvel has hollowed out a giant single volume offering 70,000 square feet of gallery space beneath three of the building’s four lightwells. Tree-planted glass roofs admit daylight—but can be shuttered if required—while five giant steel platforms (the largest 4,000 square feet, the smallest 2,100) rise and descend on pulley-mounted cables, allowing countless configurations. This is not, of course, the first time something like this has been attempted: OMA famously built an entire house around a moving platform—for the paraplegic Jean-François Lemoine in Bordeaux (1998)—and then repeated the feat at Paris’s Lafayette Anticipations (2018), another art foundation. But Nouvel has taken the idea and run with it, his multiple platforms, which are engineered to take very heavy works, stopping at 11 different levels and forming a 13,000-square-foot “aircraft carrier” (his metaphor) when aligned. This flexibility, which permits deep or shallow and tall or compressed spaces, will make every kind of art display possible, he claims.

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Glass roofs admit daylight into the main exhibition spaces for large-scale pieces (3), while peripheral areas feature smaller works (4) in the inaugural installation. Photos © Marc Domage

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For the foundation’s director, Chris Dercon, the inaugural exhibition—a “best of” featuring 300 works commissioned since the institution’s establishment in 1984—is an opportunity to show off the possibilities of this architectural viewing machine. Erratically configured, the platforms create a confusing jumble of different levels and plunging cross views, with some very low ceilings up top, while the glazed arcade facades pull the city’s bustle into the gallery space (although the relationship is not reciprocal—by day, all passersby can really see are their own reflections). If large-scale pieces like Junya Ishigami’s Sydney Cloud Arch (2015) and Chapel of Valley (2016), Freddy Mamani’s Salón de eventos (2018), and Alessandro Mendini’s Petite Cathédrale (2022) do relatively well in the main spaces, their poetics harden into monumentality in the cavernous setting. But it is the smaller-scale works that really suffer in this inaugural show, since they are displayed in the highly problematic peripheral areas. David Lynch is no longer here to bemoan his sidelining in a nasty basement corridor next to the fire exit, but how does 87-year-old Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama feel about his relegation to a far-flung low-ceilinged corner giving onto the toilets? For Simone Farresin—one half of the Italian design duo Formafantasma, who installed the opening show—the building “makes no concessions to displaying art,” which he finds a refreshing challenge after decades of the white cube. But surely the goal is to achieve a meaningful dialogue rather than a hierarchy of first-, second-, and third-class display spaces?

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Inside the 1855 structure (5), the moving platforms (6) rise and descend on pulley-mounted cables (7). Photos © Martin Argyroglo

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Fortunately, the Fondation Cartier is not in the habit of staging encyclopedic retrospectives, since it commissions living artists to make new work. It remains to be seen how they will respond to the building’s opportunities and constraints, especially since the platforms are not exactly agile, requiring a whole day for reconfiguration. This is the second time Nouvel has thrown down the gauntlet of his humanistic artistry for the foundation, the glass box on boulevard Raspail having posed a significant challenge for exhibiting art. Here, where the glazing can all be screened off, he offers a theatrical black box of tricks in defiance of the white cube of lore.

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