October 2025 marks the completion of a project on which Jean Nouvel – Pritzker Prize–winning architect and Domus Guest Editor in 2022 – has worked for years: the new home of the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris. The institution has opened inside the Haussmannian building of the former Louvre des Antiquaires, thirty years after its first chapter in the iconic steel-and-glass structure on Boulevard Raspail, also designed by Nouvel. “In an architect’s life, there are two unique moments: winning a competition and delivering an architecture: that is the case today”, said the studio’s director, Dominique Alba. It was impossible for the architect to attend the presentation of this project, which is crucial to the vision of Paris he shared with us in 2024, during the Olympic year. For this reason, Nouvel entrusted Alba with delivering the speech that offers the interpretive key to a place so rich in diverse and layered histories.
The Fondation Cartier, the shelter of the unpredictable
When entering the Louvre des Antiquaires, what I had most in mind was how to transform the Haussmannian architecture from within.
How to make this space dialogue with Paris, how to bring history into the heart of the Fondation Cartier, and creation into the heart of the city?
By creating within this architecture a free, permeable, transformable space, an open backbone that connects all uses along a 150-meter perspective from Place du Palais Royal.
By responding to the city through porosity, linking two façades, two squares, two flows.
Making the museum become an urban passage.
Producing an architecture in tension between memory and invention.
Changing the feelings and habits of those who live in the neighborhood and those who come from outside.
Reflecting on the differences we wish to create compared to what we have experienced until now.
Art settles into the life of Parisians and inscribes itself in the city’s flow, passersby, cars, bicycles, lovers...
I do not try to build “a” space, but to build “within” space.
This project condenses several decades of my reflections on space, light, and movement. It is not about shaping, but about making available.
Like the Greeks, I have always thought that the museum is the ideal place to express ideas, to discuss them, to be inside, to be outside…
Through architecture, one bears witness to an era.
What matters is the shift, and for that, one must be within the art of the time.
That is only possible if this shelter gives artists complete freedom to express their works…
All empty spaces are an opportunity for expression. All surfaces – the floors, the walls, the columns, the glass roofs – are there to raise questions.
All openings are there to frame.
All materials, all colors, all anomalies are there to motivate the artists, to provoke them, so that they may change everything if they wish.
Everything has been conceived to welcome and provoke these inventions, to seek emotion.
The Fondation Cartier will be the place of unpredictable intentions that will make us feel the Parisian magnetism of the 21st century. A place that will seek to disorient us, a revealer of a new place for the art of life within the city, in its streets, on its squares… A living, healthy art. In the very heart of Paris.
This project condenses several decades of my reflections on space, light, and movement. It is not about shaping, but about making available.
It is a form of silent, demanding, radicality, where architecture withdraws as authority to become a tool for experimentation.
Jean Nouvel
October 20, 2025
Opening image: The Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, 2 Place du Palais-Royal, Paris. © Jean Nouvel / ADAGP, Paris, 2025. Photo © Martin Argyroglo