PARIS – François Pinault’s decades-long battle to place his contemporary art collection here took a leap forward this week when the Japanese architect Tadao Ando unveiled his design to turn a historic rotunda in central Paris into a circular private museum housing the luxury magnate’s collection.
Mr. Pinault, who is one of the world’s top collectors and also owns Christie’s, said the museum would open in early 2019 after a renovation of the Bourse de Commerce, a former grain exchange that was later used as a stock market, and more recently to house the Chamber of Commerce. The building is modeled on the Pantheon and situated between the Louvre and the Pompidou Center, France’s pre-eminent contemporary art museum.
Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, said the museum in the Bourse was part of an ongoing urban renewal to give a “new beating heart” to the area adjacent to Les Halles, once the city’s central covered market that in the 1970s was turned into a wildly unpopular underground shopping center. Last year it was topped with a giant yellow canopy in an effort to heal the architectural wound.
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