The Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain by Jean Nouvel

 The Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain presents the new architectural project for its future building, designed by Jean Nouvel, at the Giorgio Cini Foundation on the occasion of the 19th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia.

This innovative exhibition, a Collateral Event of the Biennale, will be held from 10 May to 14 September 2025. Since its creation, the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain has placed architecture at the heart of its programming, using it as a means to foster creative interdisciplinary dialogue.

The current building, designed by the famous architect Jean Nouvel and inaugurated in 1994 on Boulevard Raspail in Paris, broke all the conventions of museography with the apparent immateriality of a glass cube. Thirty years later, the Fondation Cartier commissioned Nouvel to design a new building that will open at the end of 2025 on the Place du Palais Royal, also in Paris, next to the Louvre Museum. Pushing the boundaries of architectural design, the new building embodies the Foundation’s mission to engage with all forms of contemporary creation.
The exhibition, presented at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, reveals the innovative design concepts of this new iconic building and uses it as a lens to explore the future of architecture. The exhibition project draws inspiration from Nouvel’s 1980 critical text, The Future of Architecture is No Longer Architectural. The Fondation Cartier, taking up this statement, reiterates the architect’s ‘contextual’ approach, which consists in creating spaces that are not simply buildings, but cultural and intellectual environments, an architecture that transcends its own boundaries.
In his design for the new space, architecture becomes a platform for a broad spectrum of human intelligence, including the visual arts, philosophy, and technology, in keeping with the central theme of the 2025 Biennale, Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective.