Fondation Cartier

Paul von Naredi-Rainer

Description

In accordance with the ideas of Cartier, the renowned jewellers, an insurance company had a building erected on the Boulevard Raspail in the Montparnasse quarter of Paris by Jean Nouvel and Emmanuel Cattani. It was to house Cartier’s foundation for contemporary art in addition to the company’s headquarters. The architects exploited the requirements that they take into account existing building lines, retain the surrounding park with its trees, and above all, a cedar tree planted by Chateaubriand in the early nineteenth century to design a clever creation. They separated the plot of land from the street by erecting two enormous, 8-metre high glass walls, between which a paved path leads under the huge umbrella of the cedar into the building, which is set back several metres. A transparent prism of glass, steel, and aluminium on a transversally laid out rectangular ground plan, the building towers over the external glass walls, twice as tall as these and crowned with the open frame structure of a belvedere. Of the sixteen storeys in total, the topmost serve as offices, while eight are below ground and are used for storage and service rooms as well as parking. The clever trick of letting the glass façade (which is overlaid with a fine-meshed grid of latticework) jut out above and laterally beyond the building volume has a determinative influence on the appearance of the entirely symmetric building. Therefore, by superimposing multiple views, reflections, and reflected light, an impression of haziness and contourlessness is created that dematerializes the architecture, making it into a tangible illusion.

The ambiguity of this virtual reality is also characteristic of the almost entirely glazed exhibition hall on the ground floor which roller blinds can transform into a white or a black room. However, its 8-metre high glass walls along the long sides can also be slid away in order to generate a fluid transition from inside to outside, a unity between architecture, art, and nature. In contrast to this, the 6-metre high, whitewashed exhibition room on the first underground floor is without windows and receives what little daylight it gets only through three skylights.

Bibliography

Bauwelt 26/1994, pp. 1470-1476 • ARCH+ 122 6/1994, pp. 56-59 • Deutsche Bauzeitschrift 9/1994, pp. 57-59 (Katrin Koch) • Techniques et Architecture 415/1994, pp. 26-31 • Olivier Boissière, Jean Nouvel, 3rd ed., Basel, 1996, pp. 163-166 • Andrea Gleiniger/Gerhard Matzig/Sebastian Redecke, Paris. Contemporary Architecture, Munich/New York, 1997, pp. 76-81 • Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani/Angeli Sachs (eds.), Museums for a New Millennium, Munich/London/New York, 1999, pp. 146-153 (Sebastian Redecke)