For much of the 20th century, the Île Seguin, a 28-acre island just west of Paris, was a huge industrial complex, home to the first Renault factory. Now, 34 years after the factory's closure, the island is finding new life as a destination for culture.
It's been a long road to get here. The Renault plant closed its doors in 1992, and the buildings were demolished by 2005. Since then, the island has lain fallow, often described as cursed, the scene of a series of failed attempts to build ambitious projects. Early on, François Pinault asked Tadao Ando to design a contemporary art museum here, but he changed the location to Venice after losing patience with bureaucratic red tape. More recently, the Swiss art dealer Yves Bouvier tapped Jean Nouvel to build a cultural 'micro-city' on the island, but Bouvier was forced to abandon the project after allegations of fraud. One rare success story was a Shigeru Ban-designed concert hall, La Seine Musicale, built in 2017.
Step inside the new Île Seguin art centre, Large
Now it is joined by another cultural venue at the opposite tip of the island, where Laurent Dumas, CEO of the French real estate group Emerige, is constructing a 'Pointe des Arts'. The complex includes an IMAX cinema, a hotel, and a contemporary art centre called Large, which opens this month.
In contrast to the black glass sphere of La Seine Musicale, the Pointe des Arts is an angular group of buildings shaped like a sideways fin, with the museum in the middle like a copper-coloured ship. It's the first project in greater Paris for the Catalan firm RCR Arquitectes, which won the Pritzker Prize in 2017.
As RCR co-founder Carme Pigem explains, it was important to underline the project's location on an island and to engage with the surroundings. Openings and pedestrian thoroughfares cut through the buildings, providing glimpses of the river banks to either side. Metal cladding references the island's industrial history. The façade of the cinema is in rust-coloured corten steel, while the museum is covered in copper-pink scales of anodised aluminium.
'Corten steel develops a patina,' says Pigem. 'Then, as a counterpoint, we have the polished anodised aluminium, which plays on the changing atmosphere of the river landscape, capturing and creating these magical moments between the reflections on the water, the times of day, the different seasons, the interplay of ephemeral moments that you experience in a landscape like this.'
Some of the aluminium scales have microperforations that let sunlight in through large glass windows. From the exterior, the cladding appears as a solid skin. But from inside, these tiny holes create a filtered mashrabiya screen effect. RCR associate architect Gilles Trégouet explains, 'As you walk toward the exhibition rooms, you discover with surprise that this interior, which seemed quite introverted from the outside, actually multiplies the viewpoints out onto the landscape.'
In French, 'au large' means out to sea. But the museum's name also reflects its generous size: 5,000 sq m. Its sculptural form creates a multitude of shapes and volumes within it, some grand and others more intimate. 'All these spaces can be used for exhibition,’ says Pigem. ‘It’s not just that there's a small room dedicated to a small artwork. It’s about this entire space being for art, regardless of size or level. An entire journey centred around art, even outside on the terrace, where artwork can be displayed. Ultimately, it’s about creating a little world filled with endless possibilities.'
Visitors enter an expansive atrium on the ground floor, with a triangular staircase composed of steps and amphitheatre seating, a curved mezzanine overhead, and plenty of diffuse natural light through floor-to-ceiling windows. The flooring is made of dark galvanised steel planks. A cylinder runs up through the building's six floors like a vertebra, concealing the elevators.
A monumental escalator takes visitors from the mezzanine to the fourth floor, where the main exhibition space is a stunning 1,000 sq m and 14m high in places, without a single supporting pillar – a great space for showing monumental artworks. From here, visitors can step out onto a landscaped, panoramic terrace that wraps around the building and meets up with a café designed by Constance Guisset. The fifth and sixth floors contain smaller exhibition rooms (but still big enough to display a salt-corroded Renault covered in vegetation by South African artist Bianca Bondi).
The museum's unusual shape allows natural light to enter the main exhibition space through strategically placed slits. A week before opening, Laurent Dumas was walking through the newly installed inaugural exhibition, admiring the relationship between architecture and artworks. 'What surprises me is to see the reflected light, the extraordinary light on this work by Dubuffet, on the photos, on the background,' he said.
His aim with Large is to promote the French contemporary art scene – embracing both local and international artists living or working in France – with two seasons of temporary exhibitions per year, made up of loans from museums, artists and collections, including his own.
Curator Cecilia Alemani, who leads the art programme of New York's High Line, was invited to curate Large's inaugural show. Called 'Imaginary Engine,' it is dedicated to the theme of the automobile and all its facets: mechanics and assembly lines, factory workers and unions, the car as an object of desire, man and machine...
The show contains 120 works from the 1930s to today, nearly half from the Renault collection, dating back to the 1960s when the company started inviting artists to visit and collaborate with the factory. It includes exceptional works by Jean Dubuffet, Arman, Victor Vasarely (who designed the Renault logo), Simon Hantaï, Niki de Saint Phalle, Julio Le Parc and Jean Tinguely. The carmaker even hired a 22-year-old photographer unknown at the time, Robert Doisneau, to photograph the factory.
Large also commissioned 17 contemporary artists to create new works for the exhibition, such as Ghanaian sculptor Paa Joe, who made a 'fantasy coffin' inspired by the Renault taxi manufactured in the early 1900s. French artist Bertrand Lavier transformed a Formula One race car into a sculpture by covering it with a thick coat of paint.
Dumas wants Large to be accessible to the public, so 40 per cent of the space is open to all, and the exhibition is completely free for anyone aged 26 or under. And though Île Seguin isn't Venice, and there's no vaporetto, RCR has designed a charming new pedestrian bridge to the museum.
Large's exhibition 'Moteur Imaginaire/Imaginary Engine' runs from 17 October 2026 to 7 March 2027