When the decided it had outgrown its –designed glass structure on Paris’s Left Bank, its hunt for new real estate led to apt quarters for a born from a luxury-goods empire: a former shopping mall.

“Shopping mall,” however, doesn’t quite do justice to the grand Haussmannian edifice—complete with a pale-yellow limestone facade, gracefully arched porticoes, ample wrought iron, and a classic zinc roof—on the Right Bank’s Place du Palais-Royal, where the institution opened on October 25.

To convert it into a 21st-century temple of and design, the foundation again turned to Nouvel, the Pritzker Prize–winning French architect whose recent imaginative projects include the Louvre Abu Dhabi and the National Museum of Qatar. “Jean Nouvel is our architect since 40 years,” says Chris Dercon, managing

See Full Page