After years of construction and pandemic-related delays, the Bourse de Commerce — Pinault Collection in Paris has revealed a new opening date: on January 23rd (health regulations permitting), the 113,000-square-foot private museum of French billionaire François Pinault is set to welcome the public and offer a glimpse of his extensive contemporary art collection.

The monumental venue housing the extravaganza — a former grain exchange not far away from the Musée du Louvre — is capable of outshining the art it's hosting: Tadao Ando, in collaboration with Lucie Niney and Thibaut Marca of NeM agency and Pierre-Antoine Gatier, restored and completely transformed the 18th-century building.

"The Bourse de Commerce features ten exhibition galleries, as well as reception and mediation spaces," explains the project description. "They can put on different presentations or else work together in a continuum. A 284-seat Auditorium will host talks, encounters, projections, concerts, etc. The Studio, a vast 'black box' in the basement, will be ideal for the presentation of video and sound pieces. The Foyer, around the Auditorium, will also be able to put on performances, installations and free forms."

Tadao Ando describes his vision for the building transformation: "The idea was to regenerate a historic site: honoring the memory of the city inscribed in its walls and interior, while bringing in another structure, on the model of nestled Russian dolls: a composition setting up a living dialogue between the new and the old, creating a space full of life, as should be the case for a place devoted to contemporary art. The vocation of this architecture was to weave together the web of time, past, present and future [...]."

"The circular section, faithful to its urban symmetry, includes a rotunda in its center, and it is within this rotunda that there has been inserted a concrete cylinder with a diameter of thirty meters and a height of nine meters. The project for the Punta della Dogana in Venice is characterized by a basic schema: a geometrical shape surrounded by trees of bricks, while the spatial layout of the Bourse de Commerce, made up of concentric circles, has been conceived to set off a tense and more subtle dialogue between the new and the old."

"The cylinder hosts a main exhibition space inside its walls, and an auditorium below. On the exterior, it forms a corridor, an internal street, between the concrete wall and the interior of the façade, conceived by Henri Blondel. At the end of this internal street, which rises and provides access to the upper floor of the cylinder, there is a circular walkway. The frescos of the cupola, which deck the whole, can be seen as the culmination of this succession of spaces."

"On the second floor, a passageway runs around the cylinder. It provides a fresh view of the glass ceiling and the decor at the base of the cupola, painted in 1889 by five artists and depicting French trade across the continents. The third floor contains a restaurant with a view over Paris, the Jardin Nelson Mandela and its surroundings. In the basement, the auditorium is there for the organization of talks, concerts, projections and encounters."

"According to a principle dear to Ando, as in traditional Japanese architecture, the visitors follow a pathway, which gives them time to 'purify themselves,' before entering the rotunda, glimpsed through the bay windows of the hallway. They are encouraged to go around it, via a reception space."

"Once in the rotunda, the visitors can move around at their own pace, depending on whether they want to linger, cross through it, bypass it, go down to the auditorium, continue their visit in the exhibition galleries on the first and second floors or stroll along the walkway."