The Bourse de Commerce’s rebirth

The fog comes in silent waves. One moment, it recedes, revealing dark silhouettes seemingly lost in the thick white vapour; the next, it swells and swells, engulfing everything and everyone within it. I’m standing in the rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce in Paris, a former grain and commodity trade exchange dating back to the 18th century and now a contemporary art museum owned by the renowned art collector François Pinault. It opened to the public in 2021.

Pinault has been occupied with projects like these for three decades. It all began when the Breton businessman had hoped to establish a vast museum for his rapidly expanding collection on the Île Seguin, the former Renault factory site west of Paris. The project, designed from scratch by the Japanese architect Tadao Ando, became mired in years of political wrangling and planning disputes. Exasperated by what he later described as the paralysis of French bureaucracy, Pinault abandoned the scheme in 2005 and looked abroad.

A few months later, he was invited by the city of Venice to take over the Palazzo Grassi, an 18th-century residential palace on the Grand Canal, and later the Punta della Dogana, a former 17th-century customs house. Tadao Ando was deployed to insert his signature austere concrete structures into buildings layered with centuries of history. Ando’s architecture is instantly recognisable: precise geometries and carefully orchestrated lighting. Yet these elements are used with extraordinary restraint to preserve both the integrity and singularity of these historical buildings.

At the Bourse de Commerce, Ando inserted a perfect concrete cylinder beneath the dome, creating a circular corridor for visitors with regular openings into the rotunda. And it works. The heart of the Bourse de Commerce is this perfect circle, 38 metres across and almost 40 metres high, enclosed beneath a luminous iron-and-glass dome added in the early 19th century. Around its upper walls runs a 10-metre-high frieze of merchant ships, exotic ports and allegorical continents, stretching for 140 metres without interruption. The eye is drawn continuously around the circumference before rising towards the light. There is something almost Roman about it. This circular building was constructed in the 18th century as a grain exchange, and its round courtyard was originally open to the sky before being covered by a timber dome. After a fire destroyed it in the early 19th century, an iron glass dome was mounted on it  — at the time, a feat of engineering.

Every year, the rotunda shelters a spectacular art installation. This summer, it has been conceived by the 93-year-old Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya and is aptly named Cloud #07156, a fog sculpture bearing the code number of the nearest meteorological station. It ties an artificial cloud inside the building to the patterns of weather that drift over Paris. Nakaya has been working with weather patterns since the 1970s, creating transient and ever-changing landscapes from water and air pressure. She grew up in the shadow of the unusual scientific achievements of her father, the physicist Ukichiro Nakaya. He became famous in the 1930s as the first scientist to grow artificial snow crystals in a laboratory, making visible the extraordinary complexity of a phenomenon previously beyond the limits of human understanding.

For several minutes at a time, Nakaya’s fog means Ando’s concrete cylinder loses its edges; the painted panorama of 19th-century commerce becomes indistinct; strangers appear and disappear. Then the vapour thins. The circle, the frescoes and the dome return, but not quite as they were. There is a narrow interval between the old walls and Ando’s inner cylinder. You can see the daylight descending from above, and the building’s original walls beyond. The Bourse de Commerce is made fresh again.

It offers the perfect metaphor for the architectural partnership between Tadao Ando and François Pinault. Instead of commissioning spectacular new architecture to house his collections as others have done (think Frank Gehry’s Fondation Louis Vuitton, Zaha Hadid’s museums or Daniel Libeskind’s crystalline extensions), Pinault has chosen, ecologically, to reactivate and repurpose existing sites.

Ando often describes his first visit to Paris in 1965, when he went straight to Notre‑Dame Cathedral and later visited Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, as formative encounters with buildings that ‘touch people by their beauty’ decades or centuries after their construction. For him, a successful building leaves an imperishable trace on the spirit. Creating contemporary architecture within an ancient building, he has suggested in several interviews, is like the birth of a grandchild: the arrival of new life reinvigorates the grandparents.