The Night Cartier Moved In

The Fondation Cartier's new home opens this evening at 2 Place du Palais-Royal, in the 1855 Grand Hôtel du Louvre building on the corner opposite the Louvre itself. Jean Nouvel, who designed the Fondation's Raspail boulevard building thirty-one years ago, has designed this one too. He is now eighty. The building retains most of the Haussmannian fabric and rewires the interior as a vertical exhibition machine: five mobile platforms, 1,200 square metres of them, stacked and programmed to reconfigure. There are 8,500 square metres total. Six and a half thousand are for exhibitions.

You walk in off the Place du Palais-Royal at 7 p.m. The Métro is in one direction, the Louvre colonnade is in the other, the Comédie-Française is five minutes behind you. Nouvel has put tall bay windows along the façade so the inside is visible from the street, which is the first time any contemporary art institution in this quarter has operated as a vitrine rather than a fortress. People on the pavement stop and look. This is the point.

Inaugural exhibition: nearly 600 works from forty years of the Fondation's programme, hung as a single argument, co-curated with Formafantasma as exhibition designers. Formafantasma at Cartier after Salone Raritas in the same year is, incidentally, a signal. The studio has quietly become one of the three or four exhibition-design practices that institutions of this scale now turn to.

Hervé Chandès, the Fondation's general director, is at the door, working the room with a glass of water. Alain Dominique Perrin, the founder, is also here. So is the architect, who looks tired, and Marguerite Duras on a small video screen by one of the platforms, because the Fondation has been collecting Duras films for forty years and is not going to pretend otherwise tonight. Visitors move slowly between the platforms, some of them up and some of them down, because the mobile platforms have not all been fixed at the same level. The building is doing the thing Nouvel promised: behaving like a machine.

The move from Raspail, where the Fondation lived since 1994 in an earlier Nouvel building, is the event the Parisian art world has been discussing for four years. The question was whether a building optimised for a specific kind of low-key, garden-flanked contemporary art show would translate to a much busier, much more central, much more institutional address. On the evidence of the first night, yes. The central location changes the audience: tonight's crowd is more tourists, more Parisians, more curious passers-by from the rue de Rivoli, than the specialist crowd that used to come to Raspail.

Outside, on the pavement, at 10 p.m., the glass canopy that Nouvel has added to the ground floor façades is lit from inside. Rue de Saint-Honoré is busy. The Palais-Royal gardens are a block away. I stand under the canopy and watch a group of four teenagers decide, apparently on the spot, to go in. The Fondation has just acquired its new audience. It walked past the Louvre to get there.