Art in process: the Palais de Tokyo, a showpiece of the 1938 Paris exposition, has been re-opened after years of inactivity and decay. It is again a dynamic exhibition venue, but in a way that would never have been imagined 60 years ago.

The state-funded conversion of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris has involved, primarily, the reawakening of a building that had lain dormant to the public for thirty years. It has also been about the creation of a new context for contemporary art. The fact that architects Lacaton & Vassal have managed to reconcile the pragmatics of the former with the spatial extravagances of the latter (within an initial budget of just under 4 million euros), is cause enough to applaud their achievement. However, among the current crop of new, international art venues, the Palais also succeeds in addressing more challenging issues such as the tactics and politics of display.

Originally designed by Dondel, Aubert, Viard and Dastugue, the Palais was completed for the International Exhibition of 1937. The design was chosen, controversially, ahead of proposals by Robert Mallet-Stevens and Le Corbusier in an open competition. Though the palace's exterior remained intact, the interior has undergone a succession of alterations. Its last period of full occupation came to an end in 1976, when the national modern art collection was moved to the newly completed Pompidou. The history of the interior then became increasingly convoluted, not least by the last of the aborted projects -- a scheme for a Palais du Cinema, stopped for political reasons in the mid-1990s. This had advanced to a point at which the building had been made structurally unsafe, and the interior come to resemble a Piranesi ruin.

The initial phase of the work generated 8000 square metres for the principal gallery spaces (which occupy the ground floor and part of the first), and a bookshop and restaurant. Beyond ensuring structural integrity and the reintroduction of power and services, the main physical adjustments made by Lacaton & Vassal concerned the floors and the roof. Usable areas of original stone flooring were kept and extended with concrete. For the roof, the aim was to reclaim the abundance of natural light provided by the original design, reopening all the skylights and replacing some of the glass with polycarbonate panels. These are rigged to an automatic ventilation system, in technology originally developed for greenhouses.

The main entrance in the north-west corner opens into a cupola-covered volume, a feature of the original design. But the space has been intriguingly and provocatively cannibalized. A ragged chunk is missing from one of the cupola's five supporting columns and marble entrance desks have been customized with a few spray-paint, pixel-dot graffiti stencils, reminiscent of space-invader characters. Metal fencing and black and yellow security floor tape loosely guide the direction of visitor flow beyond, toward a frankfurter van trailer, which now serves as the ticket booth. In crossing the threshold, the academic grandeur of the Neo-Classical exterior has given way to its antithesis: a light, open, industrial warehouse space, under the control of something akin to an artists' squat.

Certainly not all these elements are by the architects Lacaton & Vassal (the stencils are by the graphic designers MIM, for example). But they have made the interior possible. Their vision of social space is pervasive, inspired, partly, by the Djemaa El-Fnaa market square of Marrakesh -- a space of movement and change, constantly formed and reformed by the 'whim of its actors'.

Long before the first of the artworks was installed, Jean-Philippe Vassal suggested that art had already begun at the Palais. He was referring to the life of the site, a period he calls 'habitation'. His notion dispenses with the idea of a definitive point of completion. Effectively, the site work is endless, as architecture-in-process merges seamlessly with art-in-process. The interior of the Palais has been defined as a receptacle for a constant evolution of finishes, as new artists occupy its spaces and adapt them to their own requirements. The architects battled to ensure that the interior was not whitewashed, like an orthodox gallery.

But the Palais does not definitively debunk the white cube convention, as has been suggested. Effectively, the skin of the cube has been removed as the precondition for art, but can also be replaced, along with any other appropriate solution to a particular work. The backdrop to art at the Palais is an adaptable stripped surface on which artists and curators can experiment freely, with no misgivings about the physical effects of previous or future activity. The internal spaces display the building's history through traces of surfaces and juxtaposed layers. As light has been brought back into the Palais, so its total physical history has been revealed and, in a sense, reappropriated as a readymade and hybrid architecture.

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Architect

Lacaton & Vassal, Paris

Project team

Anne Lacaton, Jean-Philippe Vassal, Jalili Amor, Emmanuelle Delage, Florian de Pous, Mathieu Laporte, David Pradel

Structural engineer

INGEROP

Photographs

Paul Raftery/VIEW

1

The etiolated scraped '30s Classicism of the exterior of the Palals de Tokyo has been preserved through all vicissitudes ...

2

... but the Interior suffered badly from several abortive alterations: now its transient, changeful qualities are welcomed.

3, 4, 5

Effectively, the work on both building and artworks is endless, as 'architecture-in-process merges seamlessly with art-in-process. Main contribution of architects of new transformation is to reintroduce abundance of natural light to exhibition areas. They battled against transforming spaces into white boxes.

6

Bookshop: architects' range of ordinary, cheap materials and careful lighting gives intensity to forgotten corner.

7

Original structure and finishes are preserved as far as possible ...

8

... for Instance In restaurant, but where stone floors are damaged or destroyed, they are extended in concrete.