Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection

Museum · Les Halles (1st)Paris,France

A domed Paris grain market ringed by a painted panorama of the world's ports, with a bare concrete cylinder standing inside it as a gallery.

The Bourse de Commerce holds a bare concrete cylinder inside a domed grain market, with a walkable gap running between them. Stand under the dome and you see two buildings at once. A painted band runs right round the base of the glass, 1,400 square metres of ships, ports and cargo across five continents, ten metres deep on its own. The dome peaks about forty metres above the floor. Inside the ring stands Tadao Ando's concrete wall, nine metres high and twenty-nine across, smooth and bare. The hall was built to keep the price of bread steady. Paris traded and stored its grain here, in a ring of covered galleries around an open yard, and roofed that yard with a wooden dome which later burned down. Iron replaced it, then glass. When the building became a commodity exchange the painted band went up around the rotunda — look up and it is still there, running the whole way round above your head. Grain, sugar and coffee were dealt under it until the last market closed. Ando's concrete wall arrived a generation after that, and the art shown inside it changes completely between exhibitions.

Worth knowing

Good to know

You can see the painted dome without a museum ticket — The café opens straight off the entrance hall and looks onto the 1889 decoration. You still need a ticket to walk on the rotunda floor.
Come on a bright day if you want to see the painting clearly — The light comes in through the glass dome, so the colours lift in sunshine and turn grey and flat under cloud.
The street around the building is a complete circle — Rue de Viarmes rings the rotunda, so it is easy to set off the wrong way and walk three quarters of the circle before you reach the door.
Look for the casting holes in the concrete — Ando's wall was poured in panels. The bolts that held the moulds left small round holes, now plugged, and they run in an exact grid.
Expect one big work standing in the middle — The rotunda floor is regularly given over to a single work made for the space, and it changes how the whole room looks.

Things to do

1
Walk the rim and follow the painted band round
Take the stairs to the walkway running along the rim of the concrete cylinder Tadao Ando built inside the hall, and go all the way round. On the inside you look down nine metres into the gallery below; on the outside you come close enough to the painted band to pick out single ships and crates. Follow that band the whole circle without stopping. Five painters divided the ring between them, each taking a continent or two, so the picture changes character where one stretch meets the next, and ice and furs give way to palms and elephants.
2
Walk the gap between the 1889 wall and the 2021 concrete
Step into the passage between Ando's concrete and the old stone ring, then stop halfway round. It is only a few paces wide and it curves out of sight in both directions. One wall is smooth grey concrete with nothing on it. The other is the old exchange wall, with its arches and carved mouldings.
3
Find Catherine de' Medici's column on the outer wall
Walk round the outside of the rotunda to the south-east side, the one facing the public garden. A stone column stands flush against the wall, and it is nearly two centuries older than the building behind it. Look for the interlaced letters H and C on the shaft, which stand for Catherine and her husband Henri. Then look up at the metal cage at the top.