The French capital’s centuries-old site has entered a new era of history with its transformation into a contemporary arts museum by Tadao Ando, Lucie Niney and Thibault Marca of agency NeM and Pierre-Antoine Gatier.

Key features

10,000 works by nearly 380 artists collected by billionaire businessman François Pinault over a period of 40 years are installed within the historical building, now comprising 10 galleries, reception and meditation spaces, a 284-seater auditorium, restaurant and a black-box basement area for video and sound pieces. The extensive renovation included the insertion of a 29-m-wide cylindrical space bound by a nine-m-high concrete wall punctuating the circular building’s central rotunda; zenithal light bathes the interior. ‘I wanted to create a composition of concentric circles to initiate a delicate but intense dialogue between the old and new,’ explains Ando of the intervention, which has restored the 16^th-century site to its 1889 refitting into the Bourse de Commerce, from the carpentry to décor. Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec developed the interior and surrounding urban furnishings in partnership with the likes of Flos, Cassina and Vitra, emphasizing the ‘union of contrasts’ in the museum.

Frame’s take

How to make an icon out of an icon – in Paris of all places? This is not the first time that Pinault and Ando have collaborated on a large-scale cultural project together: one example is the Pinault Collection’s original outpost, established in Venice’s Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana. Surely, that question has come up in conversation between the two; it’s one they’ve seemed to find the answer to. La Bourse de Commerce’s 21^st-century form not only respects the nearly 500 years of heritage on the grounds but brings forth a new chapter, the design catered to modern users and their needs. We might not be able to look forward another few centuries into the future, but we anticipate the architects’ work will be admired as considerately as that of those who came before them.