La Bourse de Commerce and Tadao Ando in Venice

During the 16th International Architecture Exhibition Palazzo Grassi - Punta della Dogana focus on the work of Tadao Ando, particularly the Japanese architect’s restoration projects for the Pinault Collection buildings in Paris and Venice, and offer guided tours of Fabrica, a project built in Treviso for the Benetton Group. The new Paris home of the Pinault Collection is due to open in 2019 in a historic Paris building, the Bourse de Commerce, curated by Martin Bethenod, who is also the curator of Palazzo Grassi - Punta della Dogana.

Tadao Ando Architect and Associates – TAAA, in partnership with Pierre-Antoine Gatier and NeM agency (Lucie Niney and Thibault Marca), designed the new contemporary art exhibition space that will be opening for the Pinault Collection in Paris in 2019. The selected location is a historic building in the French capital, the Bourse de Commerce.
Built in 1763 as a grain market, the building was first transformed in 1822 with the construction of a glass and iron dome covering the central inner courtyard, which was open in the original design. The building took on its current appearance when it was expanded by Henri Blondel in 1885, incorporating a number of adjacent buildings. After the Second World War it became the property of the Chamber of Commerce, and in 1975 it was declared a national monument. The building’s history is now linked with architect Tadao Ando, who designed the Venetian premises of the Pinault Collection in Palazzo Grassi – Punta della Dogana. The Japanese architect’s project will give the iconic Parisian building a 300-seat auditorium, rooms for video installations and experimental performances and, above all, a new contemporary art exhibition space measuring about 3000 square metres.
Comparison with the collection’s Venetian location is inevitable. Tadao Ando’s first project for collector François Pinault dates back to 2009, with the renovation of Punta della Dogana, and as in the Paris Bourse de Commerce, here too the Japanese architect found himself working with a historic building, a place of well-defined form with a prestigious past. In speaking of the project, Tadao Ando has always underlined how important it was to preserve the building’s historic nature in order to hand it down to new generations. In this case the architect added a new element to the fifteenth-century building, a cube, so that new and old co-exist side by side, a contemporary element and a historic building in constant dialogue. In the new project a cylinder measuring 30 m in diameter and 9 metres high is the contemporary element selected by the architect to dialogue with the iconic Bourse de Paris building. The cylinder configures the central exhibition space under the dome, and is made entirely out of concrete, the Japanese architect’s favourite material.

The Paris project is represented in the exhibition with models and projections of the restoration project, while a calendar of guided tours allows visitors to discover the Pinault Collection’s three buildings in Venice: Palazzo Grassi, Punta della Dogana and Teatrino di Palazzo Grassi, as well as Fabrica, a centre for research in communication which Tadao Ando designed in the ’nineties for the Benetton Group located in Treviso’s seventeenth-century Villa Pastega Manera.

(Agnese Bifulco)

Images: (c) ArtefactoryLab Courtesy Collection Pinault-Paris

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