Placing adaptability at the heart of the museum isn’t a new concept. We have been discussing the upsides of modular walling systems or adaptable furniture for many years. 

However, a new museum in Paris, the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, has blown these ideas out of the water, approaching the idea of a modifiable exhibition space at an entirely new scale. 

Designer and architect Karl Kvaran has been engaged with the architectural fabric of museums since he was a child. He has witnessed the typology of the museum shift from a static and monumental model towards something more porous and public. However, since his latest trip to the recently opened Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris, he has been left asking whether the rules of museum design have just been re-written before his eyes. Interpretation Specialist Echo Callaghan sat down with him to discover what this new approach to museum design might mean for the industry. 

I’ve always been involved in museums. My grandfather was a painter and my father held museum directorships in Reykjavik and Bergen, before ultimately leading the Astrup Fearnley Museum in Oslo. As a result, I’ve always had access to the dual nature of museums — not only as places to visit, but also as places of work. I think this experience also familiarised me with the different typologies that we have for museums. There are public and private museums but also museums that are more open to the public or more closed; those that see themselves as more of an archive or those that are focused on creating temporary exhibitions.  

As I’ve just been to Paris, the Louvre and Pompidou provide examples of the two dominant paradigms. On the one hand, the Louvre exemplifies a palace museum, with its archival collection housed within a Royal shell. It feels permanent and imposing. The Centre Pompidou, by contrast, features an externalised infrastructure as the external architecture, with a large public plaza leading visitors down into the museum. 

When the Pompidou was built, it felt that the model of the Louvre was a thing of the past and you really thought – how much more democratic can a museum be? But with the new Fondation Cartier, which is situated right between these two museum typologies, it feels like a similar shift in how we think about museum design. 

With their new building, Fondation Cartier has tried to create a new type of flexibility within a classical façade. Designed by Jean Nouvel, the building’s interior is composed of five large mobile platforms which can be raised, lowered, and recombined to produce radically different conditions, allowing the curatorial team to work with eleven different spatial configurations. In effect, they have created an interior where nothing is fixed – not the floor or the ceiling. The most helpful comparison is with a theatre, where a system of levers and pulleys is designed to allow the backstage team to completely transform the audience’s experience of the stage. In this way, the exhibition space becomes completely programmable and the architecture of the spaces becomes a curatorial instrument that can be used to create a completely new landscape for each exhibition. We might characterise it through the metaphor of the “black box” or the “white cube,” but in fact the question of mobility and flexibility pushes the argument further. In this sense, projects such as the Centre Pompidou and Jean Nouvel’s work radicalise the paradigm: adaptability is no longer an operational feature but a defining cultural and spatial logic.

It feels like this is a move away from a museum of paintings where what we had to play with was a system of walls. Instead it recognises that a new generation of artists is interested in performance, installation and digitality. The museum can now cater to that need at scale. The building is also deeply connected to the urban environment. Because they chose to undertake the adaptive reuse of a historic building, it is not an architectural landmark in and of itself. Instead it is an integrated part of the urban fabric. The exterior of the building is made up of transparent thresholds which extend the public realm into the building, encouraging incidental encounters by commuters, tourists, and local residents alike. The project substitutes permeability for monumentality, becoming a museum of the street.

The curatorial team will need to be highly spatially engaged in order to make full use of the opportunities that the building offers. They will be delivering five exhibitions a year so they will need each exhibition to show off the flexibility of the space and create a new exhibition landscape. If they don’t valorise the opportunities of the building, visitors will be disappointed. It might be that they will need a more multidisciplinary team in order to achieve this, but that something we’ve already been seeing in museums where they are recognising the need for a diverse range of skills.  

Fondation Cartier has always been known for creating an artistic dialogue and striving for a non-institutional feel. That’s something that they will want to retain during their relocation to this new building. They have always mediated between art, science, architecture and philosophy and this building translates that mandate into a tangible spatial practice.

As an institution, the gesture of offering free tickets to the public on certain days is not merely hospitable, it supports a kind of civic ethos that is embodied in the porous frontage of the building. 

Well, we will have to wait and see. Whether the approach to the design endures will really depend on the team’s ability to use the space as a performative instrument to allow the visitors to really experience the spatiality of the building. We aren’t sure of the cost of the museum, but we are certain that it was very significant. As a result, this might limit the wider ability of museums to emulate this approach. But I certainly think that it will influence how we think about museums and encourage them to look beyond the idea of a ‘black box’ or the ‘white cube’ towards a new model for museum design. This idea of a mechanical box sat within a historic skin feels significant…

Interview by Echo Callaghan