“This place was almost mythical for us because we waited so long to see it,” says Grazia Quaroni, the director of collections at Paris’s Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain. The Italian, who has been with the institution for more than three decades, is showing Monocle around the foundation’s new home, across the street from the Louvre’s Richelieu Wing. The building will open to visitors on 25 October.

The private foundation – set up in 1984 by the then-president of Cartier International, Alain-Dominique Perrin – was the first of its kind in France dedicated to contemporary art. The opening exhibition in the new space will look back at that 40-year history. It will feature 600 works from the foundation’s 4,500-strong collection, including Panamarenko’s utopian submarine sculpture, complete with a functional periscope, and photographs by William Eggleston.

While the exterior of the historic building, erected in 1855 as the Grand Hotel du Louvre, has been preserved, the interior has been transformed by architect Jean Nouvel. In its centre, five platforms – each large enough to house standalone exhibits – are capable of hoisting monumental sculptures up towards the 11-metre-high ceiling and can be staggered to reconfigure the floorplan of the building. In effect, every exhibition will feature not just new art but a new museum layout. “The potential of the space to make artworks enter into dialogue with one another is immense,” says Quaroni.

In its new home, Fondation Cartier will continue to showcase artworks that take on pertinent human-centric themes, including deforestation, migration and craftsmanship. “The foundation’s DNA won’t change,” says Quaroni. “But this new space allows us and the artists to make every exhibition a platform for widening artistic horizons.”