But Paris was always on his mind.
“For years we were looking,” says
Jean-Jacques Aillagon, France’s
courtly former minister of culture
who is now François Pinault’s special
adviser, in his Paris office on a chilly
midwinter morning. “People pro-
posed things to us, but nothing was
quite right. Then one day, in talking
to the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo,
I became aware that the Bourse de
Commerce might be available.” At
the time, it housed the offices of the
Paris Chamber of Commerce. “It
was someplace you went to get your
papers stamped,” Aillagon recalls.
“Anne Hidalgo was very concerned
that this building, which occupies
such a central location in Paris,
become a living, a public place.”
Bingo. In 2016, Pinault leased the
structure from the city for the next
50 years, taking full financial respon-
sibility for its renovation; the follow-
ing year, work on the site began.
L
ater that same day, I find
myself donning a white
hard hat and regulation
mud-stained boots to tour
the Bourse with Martin Bethe-
nod, director of the new museum.
All around us, workers are busy
putting finishing touches on the
monumental building’s restoration
(with more than 73,000 square feet
devoted to cultural programming)
and on Ando’s striking addition: an
almost 30-foot-high cylinder made
of silky-smooth concrete, encir-
cling the main rotunda and creat-
ing a vast exhibition space, 95 feet
in diameter, which on that brilliant
morning lies bathed in natural light
from the ironwork-and-glass-domed
cupola high above us. A gracefully
winding concrete staircase leads up
to a suite of galleries on the second
floor with gently curved walls punc-
tuated by windows. The staircase
also descends to a 284-seat theater
and a black box gallery for film and
video. Another staircase leads up to
the third-floor restaurant, La Hal-
le aux Grains, where, inspired by
the corn market’s history, father-
and-son restaurateurs Michel and
Sébastien Bras will offer a cuisine in
which grains, seeds, and seedlings
play starring roles.
The restaurant’s spectacular vistas
include the Église Saint-Eustache, the
new canopy
IN THE ROUND
A 19th-century mural depicts trade across the continents. “Our ethic was to accept
all the building’s history,” says architect and scholar Pierre-Antoine Gatier.
CONTINUED ON PAGE 185
165
PHOTOGRAPHED AT THE BOURSE DE COMMERCE
