Jean Nouvel arranges Fondation Cartier around five giant moving floors

French architect Jean Nouvel has overhauled a 19th-century department store alongside the Louvre in central Paris to create a new home for the Fondation Cartier, featuring moveable gallery spaces.

Set to open to the public this Friday, the building for the art foundation of luxury brand Cartier, established in 1984, is designed as a contemporary art museum to complement the neighbouring Musée du Louvre.

Nouvel aimed to radically overhaul the five-storey Haussmann-era block, which was originally built in 1855 as the Grand Hôtel du Louvre, before becoming the Grands Magasins du Louvre department store.

While the building has only been subtly renovated externally, inside, the French architect added five movable floors that allow the interior to be reconfigured depending on the foundation's installations and exhibitions.

To create the 8,500-square-metre museum, Nouvel stripped out much of the building's interiors. The majority of the original spaces were destroyed in world war two when a Lancaster bomber hit the department store.

A series of pared-back gallery spaces has been created between the existing structure, including concrete columns added during a 1970s renovation and sandstone arches that recall the building's facade.

Running through the centre of the building, the main gallery space is arranged on five giant lifts that measure between 200 and 363 square metres.

These floors, which weigh around 250 tonnes each, are raised and lowered using a cable and pulley lifting system.

"It's unprecedented," explained Ateliers Jean Nouvel studio director Mathieu Forest at the press preview.

"Nothing is permanent – not the floor, not the walls, not the ceiling," he continued. "You visit and then next time you may have an entirely different perspective."

Each movable floor can be placed in one of 11 different positions over three storeys to create numerous internal arrangements. Placing all the floors on one level creates a 1,200-metre gallery space.

When the platforms are at different levels, retractable balustrades can be extended to stop people from falling.

The floors are supported and raised on giant, notched steel columns that give a heavy industrial look to the interior, contrasting the original fabric of the historic building.

"All the machinery was left to be seen," said Forest. "It is a moving place that is ready to be reinvented every time," he continued.

"For each exhibition you will discover a new building, a new emotion."

Three of the spaces with movable floors occupy former courtyards in the 19th-century building, which have been topped with skylights.

Trees are positioned above the skylights, which include retractable closing mechanisms to allow curators to control the amount of light entering the space.

Surrounding the main 85-metre-long, movable gallery space are numerous secondary galleries, along with 1,500 square metres of balconies.

These surrounding spaces are all visible from the surrounding streets through full-height windows.

"We had to reopen it [the building], reactivate it and connect it to the city to make a new urban landmark," explained Forest.

"Transparency [was defined early], the arches mean that you can see the street from inside and you can see inside the gallery from the street."

As well as the gallery spaces, the museum contains a small foyer beside the main entrance on Place du Palais-Royal, an auditorium with 110 seats in Nouvel's signature red hue, a bookshop and a small cafe.

A large restaurant at the eastern end of the building is set to open in April 2026, with a manufacturing studio space opening later in the year.

The gallery's opening exhibition, curated by Fondation Cartier's Grazia Quaroni and Béatrice Grenier, is named Exposition Générale as a nod to the building's former life as a department store.

Designed by Formafantasma, it aims to tell the history of the foundation as a commissioner and collector of art over the past 40 years.

Nearly 600 works are on display – around 10 per cent of the institution's collection – from previous exhibitions held at the Fondation Cartier's old premises in Paris's 14th arrondissement, which was also designed by Nouvel.

"Exposition Générale, the inaugural show, plays on the history of the building, which was a department store that organised huge commercial exhibitions, that put together all kinds of different media, artefacts, textiles, fashion, etc. into this kind of hugely democratising approach to displaying objects," explained curator Grenier.

"So, 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."

"So it's a conflation of the fact that the museum can be an archive of exhibition making rather than just being an archive of objects," she continued.

"We had never shown the collection to such an extent – we selected works from each decade of collecting, and then we recited historical titles of exhibitions to create thematic entry points into the collection."

The final exhibition at the previous gallery for the Olga de Amaral exhibition, which was designed by Lina Ghotmeh – Architecture, was recently shortlisted for the 2025 Dezeen Awards in the Architecture & Exhibition Scenography category.

Elsewhere, Nouvel recently completed a "vertical garden tower" for the Rosewood hotel in São Paulo.

The photography is by Martin Argyroglo, unless stated.

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