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Upending the very notion of art galleries, French architect Jean Nouvel has turned an old Paris department store into a museum to rival the Louvre

- By Catherine Slessor

Come what may, Jean Nouvel will always have Paris. The City of Lights has been the stage and stomping ground of French architecture's vieux terrible since the early 1980s. Yet the building that first made his name - the Institut du Monde Arabe, a glittering, delicate, metallic creation inset with mechanical lenses to regulate light - is a lifetime away from the bemusement that met his last Parisian project, completed a decade ago.

That was the ill-starred Philharmonie, a gargantuan trophy concert hall, described in the Guardian as resembling “a pile of broken paving stones” and “a greatest hits mashup of dictators’ icons”. Nouvel may well concur, since he boycotted the building's inauguration, dismayed by budget cuts and design tweaks.

Defiantly weathering critical opprobrium, Nouvel is an auteur who revels in creating architecture that is always theatrical and never the same. “I’m not a painter or a writer,” he once said. “I don’t work in my room. I work in different cities with different people. I’m more akin to a movie-maker who makes movies on completely different subjects.”

So what are we to make of Nouvel’s latest movie: a new home for the Fondation Cartier, a private art foundation established in 1984 that’s dedicated to contemporary art? It is now headquartered in a remodelled 19th-century building in the heart of bourgeois Paris, right across the road from the Louvre.