£118 Million Jean Nouvel-Designed Art Island For Paris

It has been revealed that the Île Seguin – an island on the Seine in the Parisian suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt, which once hosted a Renault car factory – will be rehabilitated by the Swiss Yves Bouvier, owner of the art transport giant Natural Le Coultre.

Gagosian opened in the Northern suburb of Le Bourget, in 2012 – and Thaddaeus Ropac set up shop in thenformer heating system factory in Pantin, North East of Paris. More recently, Yvon Lambert’s former director Olivier Belot announced that he was opening his own venture, Until Then, in St. Ouen. Paris’s suburbs are, it seems cropping up on the ever-exclusive art market map – due to a Parisian art congestion in the capital, entrepreneurs are moving out of the centre.

Upon the conclusion of a fierce legal battle involving a number of environmental associations last September. The building works for the €150 million or £118 million Jean Nouvel-designed art hub are due to start next summer. The building will be imaginatively named ‘R4’, after Renault’s popular car.

The building will be located on an 8,450 square-meter patch of land, the new R4 will spread over 19,300 square meters, split over 8 levels and a rooftop; and will include an exhibition hall, a sculpture park, a performing arts venue, offices, as well as spaces for auctioneers and private galleries – are all in the planning stages. The building will also hold a facility for the storage of art.

R4 is part of a larger scheme set to turn the area between the Western suburbs of Issy-les-Moulineaux and Nanterre into a “Vallée de la culture” for Paris. The plans are part of a new trend in the Parisian art market, which has finally grasped that new opportunities lay beyond the traditional hubs of Saint-Germain-des-Prés and the Marais.

Bouvier is himself a collector with experience of organising fairs in Moscow and Salzburg, and is very attuned to the needs of European art professionals; including the ever-present need for storage space in among Paris collectors.

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