The Brooklyn Rail

What follows is the edited text of an interview with Jean Nouvel that took place by email over the course of July and August 2025. A few months earlier, at the beginning of May, at Venice’s Fondazione Giorgio Cini, I had visited the exhibition devoted to his design of the new space of the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, located at 2, place du Palais-Royal in Paris, which is set to open to the public on October 25. It will be inaugurated with the exhibition Exposition Générale, on view through August 2026, a presentation of nearly six hundred works from the collection by some one hundred international artists.

That compelling show in Venice, titled The Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain by Jean Nouvel (May 10–September 14, 2025), prompted my keen desire to discuss with Nouvel in depth his new project. In our conversation, the French architect talks about his creative process and the innovative vision at the core of this particular design, touching on the challenges inherent to intervening on an existing heritage building—a Haussmannian architecture (inaugurated as the Grand Hôtel du Louvre in 1855, then turned into the Grands Magasins du Louvre in 1887, and converted in the Louvre des Antiquaires in 1978). In particular, Nouvel reflects on the tension between permanence and mutability, speaks of his notion of the “plasticity” of the contemporary museum space, and of architecture as an act of quietly radical experimentation, while also touching on the importance of silence and poetry, among many other subjects.

Francesca Pietropaolo (Rail): Over three decades ago, you designed the building that houses Paris’s Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain on Boulevard Raspail, which was inaugurated in 1994. That building embodies a profoundly innovative idea of what museum architecture can be. Notably, by way of its radical transparency, it challenges commonly accepted, conventional modes of exhibition-making. As I see it, its glass and steel structure beautifully merges a quest for pure, simple rigor, through the emphasis on geometric volume, and a liminal exploration into quasi-immateriality. As such, it opens up a whole range of new, expressive possibilities for architecture, in particular with regards to the relationship between interior and exterior, between the building as object and the cityscape that envelops it, the built environment and nature.

Renewing your long-standing dialogue with the institution, in 2015 you embarked on a novel architectural project at the Fondation’s invitation: the design of its new spaces in a nineteenth-century building in the heart of Paris, at 2, place du Palais-Royal, neighboring the Louvre, and in walking distance from other major contemporary art institutions, such as Pinault Collection’s Bourse de Commerce, and, a little further away, the Centre Pompidou. It will be inaugurated in October 2025. Last May, a compelling exhibition devoted to it opened at Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice, an official Collateral Event of the 2025 Venice Biennale of Architecture. An architectural project of this nature involves close “listening” to the history of Haussmannian Paris, and by extension an engagement with the very notion of modernity. How did you approach the challenges integral to this commission? In your creative process, what was the initial intuition or generative question that informed the core of your design?

Jean Nouvel: This project was born from a paradox. Installing a contemporary art space in a nineteenth-century building, in the heart of the Haussmannian urban fabric, just behind the monumental façade on Rue de Rivoli, means accepting a form of heritage constraint, but also turning it into a strength. Where one might fear a straitjacket, I saw the opportunity for critical dialogue. The existing building, massive and repetitive, carried a memory. I didn’t seek to erase it, but to inhabit it differently.

My initial intuition was to work with the void. To create at the heart of this dense structure a free, vertical, traversing, transformable space; an open spine, an active void that articulates all uses; a way of responding to the city by porosity, by connecting two façades, two squares, two flows. In order to make the museum an urban passage, not a closed box, the challenge was to produce an architecture that is in tension between memory and invention, between permanence and mutability.

This space, like the one created on Boulevard Raspail in 1994, embodies a desire to break away from rigid museum typologies, but here, the break no longer involves frontal transparency: it involves internal flexibility, the ability to adapt.

It is a museum that doesn’t display a form, but rather an openness, an availability, a museum that adjusts itself to the artworks, the events, and audiences. A living museum.

Rail: The building embraces mutability: for instance, inside it includes a system of five movable platforms that can be positioned at varying heights, thus giving life to a range of different possible configurations—which to me, when visualized in the technical drawings, seem to conjure different musical cadences. The platforms lend great versatility to the space, fostering multidisciplinary programming. Can you tell me about this element, which introduces an inventive, dynamic exhibition-making tool?

Nouvel: The system of five mobile platforms is at the heart of the spatial configuration. It’s not decorative; it is operational. Each platform can be moved independently to different heights, removed, or combined. This means that the exhibition space is never the same twice. It can be compact or open, layered or traversing, linear or labyrinthine; this radical variability corresponds to what I call the “plasticity” of the contemporary museum space.

The idea is not new in my work. In Lucerne in 1993, I already proposed a museum with a modular design [for the Culture and Congress Center, which was completed in 2000.] At the Louvre Abu Dhabi [completed in 2017], the scenography rests on the coexistence of heterogeneous volumes. Here at Fondation Cartier, the platforms play an even stronger role: they generate the narrative, they are dramaturgical elements. Some artists use them as pedestals, others conceal them, others superimpose them; the system of platforms allows for an infinity of readings, without imposing a single mise-en-scène.

Architecture becomes an exhibition tool in itself; here, it doesn’t freeze uses, it stimulates them. It is a direct response to the need for freedom expressed by many artists and curators: it is about no longer enduring a space, but actively inhabiting it, reconfiguring it.

Rail: Your architecture tends to elicit emotion. Light plays a significant role in that. It also contributes to underscore transformation. Can you talk about the play of natural and artificial lighting in this building? The presence of a series of skylights is particularly interesting. In that regard, I recall that at the opening of the show in Venice, in your public speech, you evoked in particular the ever-changing dialogue with the Parisian sky that the architecture fosters, and how trees and plants will be an integral part of the building as well.

Nouvel: Light is a material that I never cease to explore. At the Fondation Cartier on Boulevard Raspail, it passes through the glass walls, enters through the garden, and envelops the artworks. Here, at the Palais-Royal, it becomes more vertical, more filtered, more uneven. I have introduced a system of glass roofs that open and close, creating a direct connection to the Parisian sky. These openings allow for a perceptual relationship to temporality: the light varies according to the time of day, the seasons, and the clouds. It inscribes the exhibition within a lived duration.

Artificial light extends this dialogue. Artificial light is not a correction, but an intensification. It modulates the ambiance, dramatizes certain spaces, and softens others. There is no standard solution; each exhibition hanging must reinvent it. I also associate this relationship to light with nature. I have placed trees on the glass roofs; they are visible from the inside. They filter light, color it, and bring it to life. They are an integral part of the atmosphere. Moreover, they are of the same essence as those in the Palais-Royal garden. This building is a luminous organism. It doesn’t light up; it breathes light.

Rail: What about the choice that you made in terms of materials and the related constructive technologies?

Nouvel: I chose raw, precise materials with no superfluous effect. Concrete is present, sometimes exposed, sometimes softened. Structural steel is visible, assertive. Glass is employed for its qualities of reflection and transparency, but without rhetoric. These are not luxurious materials; these are just right materials. It is their implementation, their articulations, their details that create the overall quality.

The constraints of the existing building required specific technical solutions, notably to integrate the mobile platforms. It was necessary to excavate, reinforce, and suspend. This required a careful coordination between engineering, scenography, and architecture. It was a delicate undertaking, carried out almost like a surgical operation on ancient tissue. But this complexity, far from restraining the architecture, made it more demanding.

Rail: The project includes exhibition spaces as well as a restaurant, a café corner, a bookshop, and an auditorium. The latter is brightly colored, in a vibrant red hue. Its custom-designed seating offers different possible configurations. Can you talk about this space, which is located on the ground level and is partly visible through glass windows from the outside?

Nouvel: The auditorium occupies a strategic location: it is on the ground floor, visible from the public space, in direct contact with the museum. It’s not an isolated space; it’s an extension of the exhibition space, a place for speech, music, and performance. I chose a deep red hue for the seats, the walls, and the floors. This red is an assertion. It contrasts with the sobriety of the rest of the building, creating a shock, an intensity.

The seats are reconfigurable; the space is flexible. It can equally host a conference, a reading, a concert, or a screening. The transparency of the bay windows allows for a mise-en-scène of this space from the street, but without spectacularizing it. One senses an activity, a presence. It is a discreet invitation to enter, to listen.

Rail: How do you approach the façade in this project?

Nouvel: The question of the façade does not arise directly, insofar as I intervene within an existing setting in a constrained heritage ensemble. Therefore, it was not a matter of creating an autonomous or manifest façade, but of working from the interior, within the thickness of the building, to create openings, establish transparencies, and capture light. What is important to me here is what the façade allows to be glimpsed, what it allows to traverse. The façade becomes a threshold, a discreet interface, a relay between the city and the exhibition space.

Rail: You have built museums in different contexts, geographies, and cultures. In particular, I am mindful of the Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris (1987), which was your first main public commission; the Musée du quai Branly–Jacques Chirac, Paris (2006); the Louvre Abu Dhabi (2017); the National Museum of Qatar, Doha (2019); and the Start Museum, Shanghai (2022), to name a few. Has this latest project in Paris further nurtured your reflections on what a museum can be and on its cultural function, envisioning its possible futures?

Nouvel: Every museum that I’ve designed—from the Louvre Abu Dhabi to the Start Museum in Shanghai—has obliged me to rethink the museum. There is no universal model. The museum is a local, contextual, and temporal invention. This new Parisian project demonstrates this once again: it’s not about repeating a form, but about reformulating principles.

Here, within the framework of a built heritage, within a historical stratification, the demand for mutability has led to an unprecedented configuration. This museum has no grand nave, no classical monumentality. It is all about articulations, mobile volumes, and variable lighting. It is a museum that adapts to each exhibition, to each artist. It affirms that the cultural function of the museum today is not to passively preserve, but to activate, provoke, and confront. The museum is a critical tool, a space for transformation.

Rail: In the last decade or so, Paris has increasingly enriched and diversified its cultural landscape in relation to contemporary art. It has seen the creation of new centers for art, such as the Fondation Louis Vuitton in the Jardin d’Acclimatation (2014) and the Pinault Collection at the Bourse de Commerce (2021), as well as the strengthening of the market sector with the inauguration of Art Basel Paris (2022) and the coming to town of major international private galleries on a permanent basis. How do you see the contribution of the new spaces of Fondation Cartier in this context?

Nouvel: Paris is currently experiencing a new moment of artistic effervescence. This creates momentum, but also a risk of standardization. In this context, the Fondation Cartier remains true to its spirit: an independent, interdisciplinary, and forward-looking space.

The new building amplifies this stance. It is not a flagship; it is a place at once welcoming and of friction. It doesn’t seek to seduce you; it seeks to make you think. Its centrality, accessibility, and flexibility make it apt to respond to this era. It proposes a different model: an urban, interconnecting, and adjustable museum that rejects hierarchies and closed forms. A museum that acts through its capacity for invention.

Rail: The exhibition at Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice brings together one-to-one scale photographs, a large-scale maquette, plans, and film projections. Wandering in it, we immerse ourselves in a lively environment where multiple perspectives collide, inviting an alertness of the senses and the mind. It is at the same time a highly precise and highly suggestive mise-en-scène, and it bespeaks your multidisciplinary approach to architecture. The exhibition space seems to turn into an all-embracing atmosphere of transformation, where even the ceiling is turned into a surface onto which projected images unfold. Can you speak about how you conceived of the exhibition in Venice?

Nouvel: The Venice exhibition isn’t an illustrated catalogue; it’s the staging of a “situation.” I wanted the public to enter into the space of the project as though entering a theatrical scenery. The one-to-one-scale photographs recreate real perspectives. The projections and models activate a sensory experience; it is a lived prefiguration of its effects. I’ve always believed that architecture can only be understood by first-hand immersion in it. Showing plans and sections is not enough. You have to create a device for approaching it. In Venice, I worked with the team of the Fondation Cartier to realize an installation—a scenography—that is a work in itself: it shows the architectural space, but also the sky, the city, the usabilities. It projects into the future by activating the present.

Rail: In that show, I was particularly taken by the detail of the images conflating details of the Venetian and the Parisian architecture and landscape onto the gallery’s glass windows. That element activates a layered play between the “here” and the “elsewhere”—inside and outside—which is further explored through the employment of some mirrored panels that add more dimensions to the room. In general, this aspect also effectively echoes the emphasis on context that characterizes your practice. Can you tell me about that?

Nouvel: One of the elements in the Venice exhibition is this superposition between two contexts: images of the Palais-Royal appear on the windows, while still allowing the light from the lagoon to filter through. This aspect creates a hybrid space, between here and elsewhere, between image and reality. The mirrors reinforce this instability. They offer intersecting viewpoints, unexpected refractions.

This work on transparency and superposition is central to my approach. It’s not about juxtaposing places, but about putting them in dialogue. Context is always active, never fixed. It influences perception. At Fondazione Cini, I sought to materialize this relationship between the surroundings of the Parisian project and this Venetian place. It’s not a comparison; it is a resonance.

Rail: This year’s Venice Biennale of Architecture is centered around the question of artificial intelligence, proposing the interrelation between different types of intelligences in shaping the cities of the future. The title of the international show, organized by Carlo Ratti, is Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective. What is your take on the current trend increasingly embracing AI in the architectural field?

Nouvel: Artificial intelligence is a tool. It can be useful for modeling, analyzing, and simulating. But it doesn’t think. It doesn’t doubt. It doesn’t dream. Now, architecture is a form of thought. It involves a responsibility. It entails a critical eye, an ability to resist or disobey. I’m wary of systems that standardize, that automate choices.

AI can produce variation, but not singularity. It can cross-reference data, but not desires. I’m not saying that we should reject it. But we have to domesticate it, redirect it, and integrate it into a complex, contradictory, and human process. Otherwise, we fabricate simulacra of projects, without depth and without history.

Rail: How would you describe the importance of drawing for you?

Nouvel: Drawing is an extension of thought. It precedes form; it accompanies doubt. It is through drawing that I formulate my intuitions, that I test my hesitations. Each line is a hypothesis. Drawing does not search for perfection; it seeks appropriateness. It allows to invent, superimpose, delete.

I still draw by hand. It’s a carnal, immediate link to the idea. It’s also a way of resisting standardization. In a world saturated with digital images, drawing retains a singularity: it reveals a gaze, a writing, an intention.

Rail: Making architecture is a collaborative endeavor. Can you touch on the process at Ateliers Jean Nouvel, specifically in relation to the Fondation Cartier’s building?

Nouvel: The workshop functions like a collective laboratory. There is no single method, but a shared spirit: that of discussion, of putting things to test, and of prototyping. We don’t seek standard solutions, but adapted inventions. Each project is a questioning. We work extensively with models, simulations, and by confrontation. Engineers, designers, and artists are involved from the outset.

For the Fondation Cartier project, this process was of particular intensity. It was necessary to integrate significant constraints—structural, regulatory, and heritage-related ones—while maintaining a radical conceptual approach. This required dozens of variations, tests, drawings, and modelings. Nothing was obvious; everything was constructed through discussion.

Rail: You mentioned the dialogue with artists, among others, as part of this process of discussion that takes place from the outset in the conception and realization of a project. Could you talk about a significant example among the exchanges with artists that have taken place while developing the Fondation Cartier project—the anecdote of a particularly passionate discussion that, perhaps, gave rise to an unforeseen hypothesis to tackle? At the core of the Fondation Cartier’s mission, since its founding, is the centrality given to the artist.

Nouvel: To answer you, I’d like to take a step back to 1984, to the creation of the Fondation in Jouy-en-Josas by Alain Dominique Perrin, with the close involvement of his friend, the sculptor César. It all started there, from a friendship—a dialogue between an artist and a man of conviction. In 2008, for the tenth anniversary of César’s death, the Fondation Cartier—then located on Boulevard Raspail, in this place that I had great pleasure in imagining—devoted a major exhibition to this exceptional artist, to whom I was also very close. I was lucky enough to be the curator of that exhibition [César. Anthology by Jean Nouvel]. It wasn’t a simple retrospective: it was a way of saying that ties never break, they are forged, they extend themselves. Everything interweaves at the Fondation Cartier; everything is responsive, and everything echoes. Friendships are passed on. This is not anecdotal: it is the very essence of the place. The new site will be the continuation of this formidable dynamic—of this spirit of dialogue, at the crossroads of disciplines and dreams.

Rail: You studied architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and, while still a student, you started working with Claude Parent and Paul Virilio, which was a fundamental and formative experience for you. Before that, early on, you wanted to be a painter. Architecture and the arts are in close dialogue for you. More broadly, countering the tendency towards limiting specialization, you have expanded the field of architecture, stressing how culture in all its manifestations—art, poetry, philosophy, cinema, and so on—is a fundamental source for the architect’s thinking and practice: a position that seems more necessary and revolutionary than ever today, in the current critical moment that we are experiencing. Sometimes you have described architecture as being somewhat similar to filmmaking. Can you talk about that? Incidentally, I am mindful of Federico Fellini’s notion of cinema-as-life, and I wonder if that might resonate with you, in some way. He famously said of cinema: “I like it because it recreates life in movement, enlarges it, enhances it, distills it. … It’s not just an art form; it’s actually a new form of life, with its own rhythms, cadences, perspectives, and transparencies.”

Nouvel: Yes, I’ve often compared architecture to cinema. A building is never perceived in a single glance; it is discovered in stages, in movement, in a succession of impressions. This is a deep conviction.

An architectural project is a mise-en-scène: we enter, we move around, we sense thresholds, rhythms, contrasts. The space is structured like a narrative—there are planes, frames, silences. It’s fundamentally a perceptive dramaturgy.

I’ve always advocated this approach, particularly in projects like the Musée du quai Branly or the Fondation Cartier. At the Palais-Royal, it takes on a new intensity. The moving platforms, the transparencies, the light that varies with the Parisian sky—all of this creates a fluid, evolving, almost cinematic experience. Visitors become the actors of their own perception; they themselves compose the film of their visit. It is this active scenography that I seek: not a static place, but a space of montage, of tension, of surprise. A living space.

Rail: As such, a living space has its own rhythms, movements, and moments of harmony and contrast. In this regard, one could say that architecture is musical, broadly speaking. Music and architecture also have in common the exploration of a territory where the tangible and the intangible are in close proximity, in subtle tension. Having also created many spaces devoted to music and opera, how do you see the possible interrelationships between architecture and music, at large? And could you say some words on your personal relationship to music?

Nouvel: Architecture is musical, indeed. Each space one designs is a score to be interpreted, a succession of movements that the body inhabits, goes through, and feels. A living place has its own tempos, its breaths, its dissonances, and its resolutions. The work of the architect can resemble that of the composer. The architect writes in space like a musician writes in time, and he seeks to weave connections, to create atmospheres—avoiding the wrong notes. To imagine a concert hall, an opera house, is to invent a setting for emotion. A place where the first note must spring in a perfect silence, a fabricated silence. It is to design a space that prepares, precedes, and prolongs the music. A place that makes you want to come back, to experience this rare intensity again. Architecture is music’s accomplice. Personally, music has always accompanied me. It is a territory of memory and imagination. In it I find a raw, immediate truth. Music teaches me about time, phrasing, and the elegance of the unsaid. And, above all, it reminds me that any creation, whether sonic or spatial, arises from a deep need to share an emotion—an emotion that is fleeting but essential.

Rail: You have spoken earlier about your initial intuition for this project as coalescing around the notion of “an active void.” That prompts me to ask you: what is your relationship with silence?

Nouvel: Silence is not an absence. It is a presence; a material in its own right, invisible but palpable, which structures space and gives it depth, its truth. It is what we do not see, but feel. It opposes visual and sound saturation with a form of withdrawal, of restraint. It is an architecture of the essential. Silence constructs. In my projects, I seek to create these silences. I do so not to erase the world, but to amplify it, to make its secret breathing heard: the wind in the trees, footsteps on stone, those fragile instants when we feel that something is going on without being able to name it. Silence is an emotion. It can be gentle, melancholic, tense, unfathomable. It is poetic and political. It allows us to listen to what doesn’t cry out, to what murmurs. I believe that architecture, at its most true, begins there: in this silent song of emptiness, in this space that is both inhabited and immaterial. A place where the world falls silent so that we can finally hear.

Rail: This project is a new major contribution that you make to the architectural and cultural landscape of Paris. It is the city that you have made your home since the late 1960s, when you moved there from the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region, in southwestern France, where you were born and grew up. Moreover, alongside your main office in Paris, you also have one in Mediterranean southern France, near Nice, where you spend periods of time. That invokes a constellation of geographies and ways of life. You have immersed yourself in a wide range of cultures as part of the process of creating buildings in many different parts of the world, “listening to” the specificity of context. Within this cosmopolitan dimension of yours, how would you describe where your sense of belonging lies?

Nouvel: I grew up in Sarlat, in the heart of the Périgord Noir, between ancient stone and deep forest. At twenty, I became a Parisian. Since then, architecture has taken me to many cities and territories, always driven by the curiosity to understand places: their uniqueness, their memory, those who inhabit them, and the horizons they call forth. It is in the attentive listening to the context, in the intimate knowledge of the milieu that the possibility of a project imbued with meaning is born. It is the love of a city, of a land, of a history that can still give birth to the exception. Before any stone is laid, before any act is set, it is essential to imagine a future, in order to avoid fate deciding in our place, and to never lose sight of the fact that each place contemplates space: not a space, but unique, infinite space—this void from which our foreign feeling of belonging to the world is born.

Rail: In what ways has this new Fondation Cartier project pushed your exploration of the possibilities of architecture to new ends?

Nouvel: This project condenses several decades of reflection on space, light, and movement, but reformulates them under constraint. It is perhaps the first time that I push the question of reversibility so far: each surface, each platform, each light can be reconfigured, moved, reinvented. As I mentioned earlier, it is not about giving form, it is about “making available.” It’s not a question of imposing a spatial narrative, but of proposing a field of possibilities, an open system. It is a form of silent radicality—not spectacular, but demanding—where architecture steps aside as authority to become a tool for experimentation.

Rail: In the face of the ever-growing standardization that afflicts not only international architecture, but contemporary culture at large, this form of radicality feels indispensable. In a recent interview—published on July 25 in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera—Edgar Morin addresses the current crisis of thought and knowledge, emphasizing the resiliency of the imagination and of poetry. In his words, “The barbarity of thought lies in simplification, disjunction, separation, rationalization … to the detriment of complexity, of inseparable connections, and even of dreams and poetry.… We must react against the dominant contemporary conception … which ignores the importance of the imagination.” Morin is quick to remind us that “the exuberance of life is poetic emotion.” Interestingly, his thoughts are echoed by those of Patrick Chamoiseau, who, in his book Que peut Littérature quand elle ne peut ? (2025), states that, “la poésie nous permet de faire face au réel et à l’impensable.” [“Poetry allows us to face the real and the unthinkable.”] According to Chamoiseau, to open ourselves up to new futures, we must abandon the prosaic—which has become the dominant trait of our era—and favor a poetic sensibility towards the world. The arts and literature are key in this process because they expand human sensibility, human consciousness. I wonder what your thoughts may be on this call for a form of poetic resistance. In your view, can architecture carry a kind of “poetic” responsibility, in that—at its best—it gives life to a moment of émerveillement [wonder], pleasure, and emotion that stays with those who experience architectural space?

Nouvel: Yes, architecture can—and must—carry a poetic responsibility. In a world saturated with norms, interchangeable objects, and standardized spaces emptied of their mystery, it is perhaps one of the last territories where we can still bring disturbance, wonder, and complexity into being. Architecture must be a way of resisting: through dreams, through place, through silence, through shadow, through this ability to give birth to something imaginary that is inscribed in matter. We do not go through a building without effect; we live it, we experience it. Architecture can upset us, slow us down, make us grow, question us, move us—provided that it is conceived not as an answer, but as an open question. Architecture is evocation, interpretation. It must be entrusted to people who are passionate about complex thought, nuance, and humanism—who know the importance of art and of the joy of living. Architecture is an echo of the poetry of place, and poetry is the essential thing: it is what saves us from indifference.