French architect Jean Nouvel has completed a groundbreaking transformation of a 19th-century department store next to the Louvre in central Paris, creating an innovative new home for the Fondation Cartier that features five massive moveable gallery floors. The museum, set to open to the public this Friday, represents a radical reimagining of exhibition space design and will serve as a contemporary art museum complementing the neighboring Musée du Louvre.
Nouvel's ambitious overhaul focused on the five-story Haussmann-era building, originally constructed in 1855 as the Grand Hôtel du Louvre before becoming the Grands Magasins du Louvre department store. While the exterior received only subtle renovations, the interior underwent a complete transformation with the addition of five movable floors that allow the 8,500-square-meter museum to be reconfigured depending on the foundation's installations and exhibitions.
The centerpiece of the design consists of five giant lifts running through the center of the building, measuring between 200 and 363 square meters each. These enormous floors, weighing approximately 250 tons each, are raised and lowered using an advanced cable and pulley lifting system. "It's unprecedented," explained Ateliers Jean Nouvel studio director Mathieu Forest during the press preview. "Nothing is permanent – not the floor, not the walls, not the ceiling. You visit and then next time you may have an entirely different perspective."
Each movable floor can be positioned at one of 11 different heights across three stories, creating numerous internal arrangements. When all floors are placed on the same level, they form a massive 1,200-square-meter gallery space. The platforms feature retractable balustrades that extend automatically when floors are at different levels to ensure visitor safety. The floors are supported by giant, notched steel columns that create a distinctive industrial aesthetic contrasting with the building's historic fabric.
To create this revolutionary space, Nouvel stripped out most of the building's interior, which had been largely destroyed during World War II when a Lancaster bomber struck the department store. The new design incorporates existing structural elements, including concrete columns added during a 1970s renovation and original sandstone arches that echo the building's facade. Three of the movable floor spaces occupy former courtyards in the 19th-century building, now topped with skylights and positioned trees that include retractable closing mechanisms allowing curators to control natural light levels.
"All the machinery was left to be seen," Forest noted. "It is a moving place that is ready to be reinvented every time. For each exhibition you will discover a new building, a new emotion." The transparency of the design was a key consideration, with full-height windows throughout the surrounding galleries offering views to the street. "We had to reopen it, reactivate it and connect it to the city to make a new urban landmark," Forest explained. "The arches mean that you can see the street from inside and you can see inside the gallery from the street."
Beyond the revolutionary gallery spaces, the museum includes a small foyer beside the main entrance on Place du Palais-Royal, an auditorium seating 110 people designed in Nouvel's signature red color, a bookshop, and a small café. Additional amenities are planned, with a large restaurant at the building's eastern end scheduled to open in April 2026, followed by a manufacturing studio space later that year. The facility also features 1,500 square meters of balconies surrounding the main 85-meter-long movable gallery space.
The museum's inaugural exhibition, "Exposition Générale," curated by Fondation Cartier's Grazia Quaroni and Béatrice Grenier, pays homage to the building's former life as a department store. Designed by Formafantasma, the exhibition showcases the foundation's 40-year history as an art commissioner and collector. Nearly 600 works are on display, representing approximately 10 percent of the institution's collection, featuring pieces from previous exhibitions held at the Fondation Cartier's former location in Paris's 14th arrondissement, which was also designed by Nouvel.
"Exposition Générale plays on the history of the building, which was a department store that organized huge commercial exhibitions, bringing together all kinds of different media, artifacts, textiles, fashion, etc. into this hugely democratizing approach to displaying objects," explained curator Grenier. "We adopted this philosophy to show our collection, which is itself a collection of exhibitions, because the Fondation Cartier, over its whole history of programming for 40 years, commissioned artists, exhibited them, and then collected their work."
The new Fondation Cartier represents a significant addition to Paris's cultural landscape, established originally in 1984 as the art foundation of luxury brand Cartier. The project demonstrates Nouvel's continued innovation in museum design, following his previous architectural achievements. The moveable floor system creates unprecedented flexibility for exhibition curation, allowing each show to fundamentally reshape the visitor experience and spatial relationships within the historic building.
