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A special exhibition is being held to mark the occasion of 30th anniversary of the establishment of the Cartier Fondation, housed for the past 20 years in an iconic building on the site of Chateaubriand’s house in the Boulevard Raspail. The Serpentine Galleries’ co-director of exhibitions and programmes and director of international projects Hans-Ulrich Obrist talks with Jean Nouvel, the building’s architect.

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In conversation: Hans Ulrich Obrist and Jean Nouvel

A special exhibition is being held to mark the occasion of 30th anniversary of the establishment of the Cartier Fondation, housed for the past 20 years in an iconic building on the site of Chateaubriand's house in the Boulevard Raspail. The Serpentine Galleries' co-director of exhibitions and programmes and director of international projects Hans-Ulrich Obrist talks with Jean Nouvel, the building's architect.

Thirty years ago uber-brand Cartier set up the Cartier Fondation for arts patronage that has since seen it put together an impressive and eclectic collection spanning painting, sculpture, design, film, photography, fashion and graphics.

Jean Nouvel's building for the Fondation Cartier, built 20 years ago. The trees were central to the design and the building's outline is deliberately obfuscated by the façade. Jean Nouvel / ADAGP, Paris. Photo: Luc Boegly

It has the feel of fine art meets wunderkammer and is 'characterised by a spirit of curiosity and inquiry'. To mark this anniversary the foundation put together a show, Vivid Memories, looking back at some of its key acquisitions and commissions, with works from the likes of Ron Mueck, Marc Newson, Allessando Mendini, Issey Miyake, Moebius and Bodys Isek Kingelez. And over the next few pages you can see a selection of work drawn from that exhibition and past shows.

Hans Ulrich Obrist

A decade after the Fondation Cartier was founded it moved into a purpose-built building designed by Jean Nouvel. The ground floor houses the highly flexible exhibition space, with Cartier offices above. The exterior plays with transparency, the facade extending out beyond the environs masking its true form. On the 20th anniversary of that building's opening Hans-Ulrich Obrist talks to architect Jean Nouvel about the creation of his self-proclaimed 'Parisian monument':

Hans Ulrich Obrist: In the early Nineties, after my grant at Jouy-en-Josas, I spent a year living at the Hôtel Carlton on Boulevard Raspail and did a lot of walking round Montparnasse with Raymond Hains, a great local personality, who knew the neighbourhood inside out.

Jean Nouvel: He was a friend of mine, too.

Jean Nouvel

HUO He was always talking to me about Chateaubriand, who lived on the current Fondation Cartier site, a figure who haunts that space. It's a place associated with romanticism, you could say.

JN It was Chateaubriand, in 1823, who planted the famous cedar of Lebanon at 261 Boulevard Raspail that for me is the real monument here. The site was chosen when the American Center moved from there to the building designed by Frank Gehry over on the Right Bank of the Seine. At the time the developers and the Gan insurance company had a project for this piece of land -- mainly office buildings -- which were going to occupy most of the site. Local groups were protesting, trying to preserve the cultural function and green space and, in what was quite a turnabout for Paris, the then mayor, Jacques Chirac, cancelled the building permit. Gan knew that Alain Dominique Perrin [founder of the Fondation Cartier] was looking for a new site and got in touch with him. Alain accepted it, but only if he could choose the architect. That's where I came in.

From the exhibition Beat Takeshi Kitano, Gosse de peintre in 2010. Takeshi Kitano/Fondation Cartier

HUO When Julia Peyton-Jones and I invited you to London to design the Serpentine Galleries Pavilion in 2010, I had a chance to observe your process. When you work, you start with a concept, a very clear idea. Can you tell us about the process of creating the building for the Fondation Cartier as a response to a site and a context?

JN Yes of course, the constraints were very particular. [...] Moreover, after the permit was cancelled we could only build on the footprint of the demolished American Center. That meant having a relatively tall building, but then there was a risk that it wouldn't work in relation to the rest of the boulevard. I asked myself how we could play on the closeness of the building and the cedar while respecting the context, so that we wouldn't end up with an orphan building that would look completely incongruous in the middle of the boulevard.

That's when I had the idea of playing on depth and creating maximum ambiguity by having three successive layers of glass: a play on dematerialisation, presence-absence and the absence of limits.[...] To cancel out the side limits, I thought about making the facades of the building bigger than the building itself, so they reach beyond it. And after lengthy observation, I realised that this superposition of the thing observed, and its reflection, created an uncertainty. In other words, if you reflect a cloud in a cloud, if you create the reflection of a tree on a tree, by "trans-appearance", something happens that has to do with emotion, something "unsettling" in every sense of the term.

Still from Matthew Barney Cremaster 4, the first in the Cremaster Cycle that was funded by the Fondation.

I decided to play on these parameters so that these two walls would reflect the trees standing in front, on the sidewalk, and that this reflection would be imprinted on the trees behind it.

For the building's base, the biggest temporary exhibition space, I opted for total absence, thanks to complete transparency over a height of more than 8m. Thus, through the facade of the entrance, you can also see the trees behind. And if I add two layers of glass on the sides of the building, I put trees back in. This means my trees can be read in continuity with the neighbouring trees; in depth, they multiply or are perturbed by reflections. As a result, the initial impression is of something becoming dematerialised in a space whose limits we cannot gauge, characterised by the perpetual presence of plant life and the sky, which is "supra-present": in the middle, it is there reflected on the offices, on active life; around, we see the sky reflected on itself.

Issey Miyake, Making Things, 1998. Tissey Miyake/Fondation Cartier

HUO Every exhibition at the Fondation Cartier reinvents its spaces. It's interesting because when you build a contemporary art foundation, you don't know what the art of the future will be, the relation it will have to the space. And there, you have created two very different spaces: the ground floor is transformable and open; the basement can become a cinema or conventional gallery.

JN Yes. That thought process was linked to the strong constraints of the site, but also to my experience of temporary exhibitions -- from 1971, I was architect for the Biennale de Paris, presenting artists who were shown at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Centre Pompidou, the Villette, the Parc Floral... For the Fondation Cartier, it all began with two notions: emptiness and the unity of interior and exterior. In reality, the building plan was extremely simple.

Takeshi Kitano, Gosse de peintre in 2010. Takeshi Kitano/Fondation Cartier

The first decision, which initially came in for a lot of criticism, was the absence of walls in the interior spaces. People were amazed that someone could build a museum without walls.

I knew that the main problem you have with a temporary exhibition is working with the existing space. It is actually much easier to put in a new wall than to remove one. Consequently, I chose a hyper-flexible exhibition space, with each very long floor being amenable to any kind of occupation: you can put in as many walls as you want or leave it totally empty. In other words, you're inventing every time, usually quite simply, using freestanding picture walls for example. [...] The ground floor is thus a completely theoretical space, totally empty, 8m high.

The exterior is an extension of it, because as well as being transparent, the ground can also be totally open. The enormous sliding glass panels of the ground floor, 8m x 3m, can indeed slide outwards and overlap in the wings, where the facades continue beyond the building. The exhibition space is thus totally open, and the Fondation is built on stilts!

A piece by Moeubius, Jean Giraud, who had his own show in 1999. Moebius Productions

The basement, conversely, is completely opaque. This space is delimited by walls made of concrete and is totally empty, allowing you to exhibit what you want as you want. At first, I made small openings in the ground floor, kinds of windows so that bigger works could be installed in the basement, and to shed light down. These horizontal windows were not used in the end, and the decision was taken to block them and block the light out completely. I wasn't necessarily convinced by that option, but that was the choice that was made. What is interesting is the contrast between this closed space surrounded by walls and the first floor, where there is an osmotic relationship between interior and exterior. From one exhibition to the next, the artists have tried out a great variety of attitudes, going from a building that was completely open to the outside for La Volière by Jean-Pierre Raynaud, to the exhibition By Night, where everything was closed, so as to give a feeling of occultation in the space.

Artists played on the presence of the works in nature, or again on the visibility of the display devices from outside, without a "window display" effect in the traditional sense of the word: you have more a sense of works fitting into a landscape setting. Flexibility was therefore the first parameter of this option, a rather radical one for a temporary exhibition space, but also a matter of the identity of the place.

The Fondation Cartier is not a neutral space. When you are there, you are inside and outside at the same time, and you wonder how the works got there, in the middle of these trees brushing against them.

HUO That brings us to the question of the garden. I remember a magical moment: the last performance by James Lee Byars, who came to Paris for his final farewell before going to Egypt to die. He was like a kind of apparition: dressed in a gold suit; he left his hotel, crossed the Boulevard Raspail, entered the building, entered the garden and, without a word, went back to the hotel.

JN The presence of the golden sphere was magic, too. That void, that sphere placed in the middle of the scene, the emptiness. It was really surprising.

In Bed, created by Australian sculptor Ron Mueck for the 2005 exhibtion Mueck. It is one of three works by the artist in the foundation's collection. Ron Mueck, Photo: Patrick Gries

HUO That was a great moment in the Fondation Cartier garden, that was created by Lothar Baumgarten.

JN I asked Marie-Claude Beaud for the garden to be as natural as possible: basically, not designed. In that sense I really loved the approach taken by Lothar Baumgarten. It was exactly what I was looking for and a complete success: a garden including as many natural species as possible, all living together in the space. I was less in phase with the architectural aspect, that kind of artificial hole and the amphitheatre with the side of the stone showing.

A piece from the exhibition Un monde réel, 1999, by the French graphic artist Jean Giraud, better known as Moeubius. Moebius Productions.

The idea was a kind of pre-existing archeology, which doesn't really suit the site, in my opinion. I gradually got used to those big steps where visitors come and sit, but I never really got used to the hole. I think that in Lothar's mind it is a meditation room. But I do like everything that is natural in the garden: the fact that it is dry in the winter, that you can sense the coming of spring. You get huge differences over the four seasons.

An element from Jean Paul Gaultier's Pain Couture exhibition from 2004. Photo Stefano Pandini for The Fondation Cartier Pour L'art Contemporain

HUO That brings us to another opening: apart from the opening on to the garden and the oscillation between interior and exterior, there is also the vertical aspect -- think of Patrick Blanc's vertical garden, above the main entrance to the building -- and the idea of ascension linked to transparency. I always remember the first time I visited the Fondation Cartier: there was a reception on the roof. I took the transparent elevator and had this incredible experience of Paris when I arrived on the terrace. I'd like to know how this play on transparency takes us up to the top, vertically.

In an earlier interview you told me that the big question for you today is the essence of the material, and knowing how to connect it with transparency. Can you tell me about that?

Ron Arad's installation for his eponymous show in 1994.

JN You have to bear in mind that, quantitatively speaking, the programme was mainly about office space. True, I bestowed strong symbolic significance on the exhibition space by giving it a height of 8m, by the fact that there is not a single post inside, and by the extremely light structure, which I worked on with Ove Arup and Paul Nuttall. On the upper floors, where the offices are, there is a great emptiness. The different offices are delimited by partitions in sanded glass, creating an effect of mist and hiding the people working there. The impression you get is that they are in a dematerialised space. The interiors play on reflections that act at the base of the partitions and also create an effect of levitation above the ground. And when you look at the cedar from the offices, it seems to be standing out against tracing paper.

All the interior architecture is based on these effects of dematerialisation. [...] I often speak of the way a discipline constantly questions itself in relation to the times, both symbolically and sensitively. And the question of matter -- its presence and its ambiguity -- but also of light, and the relation between the two are indeed some of the big questions of the day, in my view. We try to deal with them using our own modest and inadequate means. Hence the notions of "presence-absence", "inside-outside", and all these ambiguities which create uncertainty.

Kelvin 50, by Marc Newson (2003) was created for the exhibition Kelvin 40. Marc Newson,. Photo: Daniel Adric

HUO According to the art historian Erwin Panofsky, our inventions are often based on fragments from the past. You told me that you were greatly inspired by the architecture of light in cathedrals, but also in certain 11th-century churches. Were you inspired by past constructions for this very specific building for the Fondation Cartier?

JN I have always been responsive to the architecture of light. Indeed, my prime ambition is often to make buildings that stand in a spatial continuum, that belong to the air. I believe that we build in the solid, that construction is just a variation of this solid. Of course, like other projects of mine, the Fondation Cartier is a permanent play on layers of light, both material and immaterial.

They proliferate, interfere with each other, pick up reflections or drops of water for refraction, disappear because something intervenes, are printed on to the background (especially the trees), mesh together when overlaid or when you step back... The materials -- glass and aluminium -- were chosen for their ability to pick up colour and light. Paradoxically, this play on dematerialisation probably makes the Fondation Cartier the building most permeated by its site that I have managed to create.