Carré d’Art – Museum of Contemporary Art of Nîmes

The fountain in this square has a modern design.

Inaugurated in 1993 by the architect Norman Foster, the Carré d’art-Musée d’art contemporain is the implementation of an ambitious logic that gives the city of Nîmes a contemporary showcase in both architecture and the visual arts.
The museum's exhibition areas are on two floors, one for the permanent collection, one of the largest in France, the other for special exhibitions by international artists.
The collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, which started in 1986, comprises over 400 works. The collection extends from 1960 to the present day. Their compilation has focused on the representation of movements that have emerged in the south of France, such as New Realism, Support Surface and the Figuration Libre. The hanging of the collection, which is renewed every year, enables a deeper approach to the major artistic movements and enables the new acquisitions to be exhibited.
The life of the museum is also organized around special exhibitions, especially monographic exhibitions, which have made it possible to publicize the works of important artists in France.

In the place of today's Carré d’art there was a theater building with a classical stone facade, opened in February 1800, which was burned on October 27, 1952. The main facade with its mighty colonnade, which has been preserved, should initially also be preserved in the event of a new building, not least because of the neighboring Maison Carrée, an excellently preserved Roman temple from the first century BC.

In 1984 a competition among twelve invited architects, including Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel and César Pelli, was decided in favor of the British architect Norman Foster. Foster's building opened in May 1993. In the end, despite numerous protests, the theater facade was not preserved. It was dismantled and reconstructed in the wild at the Caissargues motorway service station. Foster's glass front with its narrow steel pillars takes up the pillar motif of the neighboring Maison Carrée and the nine-storey cultural center respects the height profile of the square by lowering several storeys. The energetic meaningfulness of Foster's glass cube in the Mediterranean area has been partly disputed.