The Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain by Jean Nouvel

The exhibition unveils Jean Nouvel’s innovative design concepts for the Fondation Cartier’s future spaces. Since 1984, the Fondation has placed architecture at the heart of its programming, positioning it as a catalyst for interdisciplinary dialogue. Its historic building, designed by Nouvel and inaugurated in 1994 on Boulevard Raspail, Paris, broke exhibition-making conventions with its immaterial glass and steel structure.
In its new space, opposite the Louvre at 2, Place du Palais-Royal, architecture becomes a dynamic tool for exhibitions, embedded within a nineteenth-century Haussmannian building. Kinetic floors allow infinite configurations, positioning architecture within the broader spectrum of human creativity—visual arts, performance, theatre, technology, science, and philosophy. Visitors discover the premises of this new architecture through a display of models, projections, plans, and prototypes. This striking meeting of past and future dissolves the boundary between construction and preservation, merging architecture with the urban landscape and its history.
An accompanying public programme explores the “museum as a site of architectural experimentation”, and its role in shaping the future of the architectural discipline.