The story
The building went up in 1937 for a Paris world's fair, a long colonnaded slab of pale stone above the Seine, and for decades its west wing held national art collections that came and went. When it reopened in 2002 as a centre for contemporary art, the architects did something unusual: instead of polishing the interior, they left it stripped back to bare concrete, exposed pipes and raw floors.
That rough shell is now the point. At around 22,000 square metres it is one of the largest spaces for contemporary art in Europe, and with no permanent collection to protect it can hand whole floors to a single living artist for a temporary installation. The rooms change completely from one season to the next. It stands almost next door to the Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris, which occupies the building's other wing, so the same 1937 facade covers a settled collection on one side and a construction-site aesthetic on the other.
