Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection

The building began as a grain hall, built from 1763 to 1767 by the architect Nicolas Le Camus de Mézières on the site of the Hôtel de Soissons, the former palace of Catherine de Médicis, on a circular plan around a central courtyard. The Médicis column, raised for Catherine de Médicis's mansion, escaped demolition and stayed in place, set against the new hall.

The central courtyard, covered in 1783 by a timber dome that burned down in 1802, then received the cast-iron dome of the architect François-Joseph Bélanger, a work of 1812, first clad in copper and glazed in 1838. In 1889 the old hall was remodelled to become the Bourse de Commerce, under the architect Henri Blondel. A fresco almost 140 m long, painted between 1886 and 1889, then ran along the wall of the dome, celebrating trade between the five parts of the world. The exchange stayed there until the end of the twentieth century.

François Pinault, who chose to safeguard and transform the monument to show his collection there, entrusted its conversion into a museum to Tadao Ando, who had already inserted a cube into the triangular building of the Punta della Dogana in Venice. The practice NeM (Lucie Niney and Thibault Marca) co-signed the transformation with him, and the practice of Pierre-Antoine Gatier led the restoration. The museum opened to the public on 22 May 2021.

Tadao Ando's gesture is a concrete cylinder inserted at the centre of the rotunda, "a circle within the circle", an echo of the building's circularity. The wall, 9 m high, rises beneath the glass roof. On the ground floor it encloses an exhibition space; concrete staircases wrapping around it lead to its top, where a circular walkway gives a closer view of the dome, the fresco and the original interiors. Between the outside of the cylinder and the old interior façade runs a corridor serving the exhibition rooms. The wall continues into the basement, where it forms a concrete foyer around the auditorium.

Ando wanted to preserve the old building and build within what existed. The building measures 60 m across and the rotunda 38 m; light enters through the glass roof and, over the course of the day, the interior space constantly changes its look.

The restoration of the historic monument is the work of the practice of Pierre-Antoine Gatier, chief architect of historic monuments. For him, one of the most important challenges was to save Bélanger's dome: to strengthen it without altering the authenticity of its cast iron, and to fit it with a highly technological glass. The fresco of the dome was restored for the museum's opening.

It is a contemporary art museum showing the Pinault Collection, about 10,000 works dedicated to art from the 1960s to the present, in temporary displays that are regularly renewed. The rotunda and the display cases around it host exhibitions designed for those spaces. In the basement, the Studio is devoted to video and sound works, and the Auditorium programmes lectures, talks, screenings and concerts. Works from the collection are also installed in situ, in dialogue with the architecture.

The museum is open from 11 am to 7 pm, with a late opening on Fridays until 9 pm; it is closed on Tuesdays and on 1 May. Entry is free during the evening opening held on the first Saturday of every month, between 5 pm and 9 pm. The address is 2 rue de Viarmes, in the 1st arrondissement; the metro stations Louvre — Rivoli, Les Halles and Châtelet serve the area.

Suitcases and objects larger than 40 × 18 × 30 cm are refused, and backpacks are not allowed in the exhibition galleries: self-service lockers are on the ground floor. To understand the architecture better, a tactile model is shown on the ground floor, and the small lounge on the third floor offers texts, a model, a film and a view of the rotunda, the Canopée des Halles and the rooftops of Paris.