Jean Nouvel has put forth a new plan for the Fondation Cartier pour l’art Contemporain in Paris. The adaptive reuse project, which was announced Tuesday by the 40-year-old private foundation, will take shape within an existing Haussmann-era building on the Place du Palais-Royal across from the Louvre for the end of 2025.

Novel’s effort will address the current architecture's urban context while opening up the former Louvre des Antiquaires facility to the Parisian public in a whole new way.

First and foremost, this will be a space dedicated to what the Fondation Catier’s founder Alain Dominique Perrin called the "transversality" of art-making. A total of 6,500 square meters (or, 69,965 square feet) will be available for a flexible layout of exhibitions. The space is augmented by five mobile platforms that allow the building’s surface areas to be modified and reconfigured into a layered series of vertical spaces up to 11 meters (36 feet) high.

Another 2,000 square meters (21,517 square feet) brings the program’s total to 8,500 square meters (91,493 square feet) worth of public space. An elevated 1,200-square-meter (12,916 square-foot) walkway enables aspects of the individual volumes created by the platforms for visitors to take in above in its recesses. 

Paris has emerged as a leading hotbed for contemporary art in the last decade with two new private collections and the introduction of the Art Basel Paris and Art Paris fairs to its steady cultural offerings. Nouvel had previously designed the foundation’s smaller current home on the Boulevard Raspail in 1994. The Fondation Cartier says his reuse of the space allows for a "perpetual renewal" on par with its mission to create opportunities and promote experimentation. 

"Moving into such an impressive site, in terms of location and history, entails a form of invention," Nouvel stated of the conditions. "And what is invented is not automatically seen in the steel or stone. The space is marked by a different way of doing: a way of conceiving how artists can have maximum power of expression."

"A site such as this one calls for boldness, courage that artists might not necessarily demonstrate in other institutional spaces," he continued. "The Fondation Cartier will likely be the institution offering the greatest differentiation of its spaces, the most diverse exhibition forms and viewpoints. Here, it is possible to do what cannot be done elsewhere, by shifting the system of the act of showing."

The foundation also announced it plans to vacate the current premises on the Boulevard Raspail to coincide with the new project’s opening. It follows the dissolution of a previous plan for the Île Seguin in 2014.