The project of François Pinault’s Foundation for contemporary Art is a gift. It is far ahead from the simple functionalfact, it transfigures a collection by opening it to a large audience, and a site, by establishing on it a unique place. It is important to account for such generosity. As if it were a public building, the Foundation will not ignore the surrounding town and will even use it by creating mutiple bonds between itself, the river and the banks. That way, a place where contemporary art will start living, expressing our multiple cultures, which will be contemplated, manipulated, studied, to put it in a nutshell: shared. (…) The Foundation can not be reduced to a “building – object”, but creates a landscape and develops a presence of a mysterious kind. A sort of dematerialization, immateriality, of irreality. This architecture is not a tent nor a wrapping revealing an existing form. In this case, the minimum act of linking the volumes which constitute the building with the borders of the base, creates a new volume, unprecedented, directly stemming from the process of creation.
“I did nothing, not that I am innocent, but I did no more than use the base as a base, the volumes as volumes, the tissu as a tissu. The “alchemy” of the encounter of these primary elements lies in the study and the defining of the relationships that they keep."
Dominique Perrault | June 2001