Avec Jacques Guillot
Built as part of the Grands Travaux under the Presidency of François Mitterrand, Le Magasin is the first operation that gave Patrick Bouchain “visibility”, identifying the architect behind the scenographer. In 1985, the Grenoble Municipality and the State wanted to create a contemporary art centre in the Halle Bouchayer-Viallet. They needed to work quickly and to a very tight budget. Faced with the financial difficulties of adapting this industrial hangar to museum standards, P. Bouchain offered Jacques Guillot (future director) a radical solution: “do nothing”. Make the place comply with safety requirements but limit transformations to the strict minimum, by building simple “autonomous museum boxes” underneath the historical glass atrium that would be kept unchanged. Inaugurated by François Léotard in April 1986, Le Magasin stands out in French cultural history as one of the first art centres installed on a brownfield site and as one of the first European schools to provide training the field of curatorship.It influenced the trend in using “brownfield sites” and a whole generation of architects in their light-hearted and alternative approach to construction (including Anne Lacaton and Philippe Vassal for the Palais de Tokyo in Paris) and for Patrick Bouchain, Le Magasin was the start of a long series of “reconversion” operations, which were always in the service of artists and founded on being thrifty with resources: ‘Consolidating rather than repairing, repairing rather than restoring, restoring rather than recreating, recreating rather than embellishing.’ (P. Bouchain)
