Mirfield, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom
Tadao Ando together with NeM / Niney et Marca Architectes and Pierre-Antoine Gatier Agency have transformed a 250-year-old former commodities exchange in Paris into a new contemporary museum for the Pinault Collection.
François Pinault selected Japanese architect Tadao Ando to mastermind the conversion of the Bourse de Commerce into a museum.
Since 2000, Ando has collaborated with François Pinault on three projects in Venice: the renovation and preservation of Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana and the construction of the Teatrino.
The structuring element of the plans to adapt the Bourse de Commerce into a museum is conceived as an echo to the building’s fundamental organizing principle: its circularity. Tadao Ando’s intervention within the building dialogues with its carefully restored historic elements.
This decision was as the natural consequence of the approach Ando has consistently adopted when working within existing buildings. Here, we must contend with the history of the building and that of Paris, capital of the nineteenth century.
A concrete cylinder, its walls pierced with four identical openings and surmounted by an oculus that allows natural light to filter in, was inserted into the building’s core.
The center of the building was once used to store wheat, then was the active center of the stock market, directly open onto the recently built Paris streets that converged there; now, it is isolated, becoming the building’s unified, abstract, and fixed core, and an ideal space in which to experience art.
The main components of the architecture (its circular form, its dome, the controlled presence of light) become the actors in a scenography intended to remove visitors from their daily lives, to allow them to focus on what’s before their eyes, on the here and now.
The goal of the conversion of the Bourse de Commerce into a museum is to create the ideal conditions for the visitor to experience art. It is flexible and adaptable, to best accommodate the range of different media used by contemporary artists today.
The architects’ intervention in the building relies on emphasizing its most striking attributes and the remarkable features of the site while writing a new chapter in its history. The concrete and symbolic nods to its past, such as the Medici column, the double-spiral staircases, or its rotunda, emphasize the role of the past as the foundation of contemporary creation.
Because of the circularity of the site, the ways of exploring the building are virtually inexhaustible. It serves as a metaphor for the way in which history can be reinterpreted and rediscovered according to new logics. Ando has often, throughout his career, relied on circularity as a structuring principle; it recurs in his work, almost as his personal signature.
These unique conditions combine to make this space the site of an encounter between the rich past, embodied by this centuries-old building, and the modern-day desire to present a unique collection to the public, all in the hands of the renowned Tadao Ando.
Like Ando, Nicolas Le Camus de Mézières, the building’s original architect, believed in the suggestive power of forms on human emotions.
His treatise The Genius of Architecture; or, the Analogy of that Art with our Sensations opened with the provocative formula, “It is not enough to please the eyes, you must touch the soul.”
In 1977, Ando similarly described architecture as “a fundamentally emotive space.”
The volumes of the central rotunda, bathed in the changing light, are the silent witnesses to a perpetual movement of exchange and originality.
In approaching the renovation of the Bourse de Commerce, the architects’ common aim is to infuse the different historic strata of the building with a new life, by adding, at the core of the building, a concrete cylinder that disrupts the existing volumes of the space and creates a new means of circulating through the building.
This cylinder, linking two walls and two eras, creates a path through the ground floor that becomes a passageway to the floors above, leading the visitor in a centrifugal movement to each of the spaces open to the public.
A walkway, curled around this central cylinder along the building’s internal façade, offers new vantage points from which to view this historic building.
The path also leads to the new auditorium, located underground beneath the foundations of the cylinder. Its stage is aligned with this circle, in a subtle reminder of the centrality that forms the core of the building.
The newly created exhibition spaces are organized around the central core of the building, in a strategy aimed at increasing the number of ways in which the building can be visited. Visitors will enter into a vast reception area located on the ground floor, then continue to a double-height exhibition room.
On the first floor, a small exhibition space was inserted between the ancient walls. As they continue up the walkway, visitors will be able to access the second floor from two points.
On the third floor, the visit ends on a stunning panorama— of the city to one side, and of the interior of the building, its skylight, and frescos on the other.
Visitors can then choose between retracing their steps back to the lobby or using the double-spiral staircase, a vestige of the building’s past as the former Halle au Blé, to return directly to the ground floor.
Architects: Tadao Ando
Collaborating Architects: NeM / Niney et Marca Architectes and Pierre-Antoine Gatier Agency
Original Architect: Nicolas Le Camus de Mézières (1782)
Client: Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection