Paris is about to gain its largest new contemporary art venue in years. Large, a 5,000 sq m art centre on the Île Seguin in Boulogne-Billancourt, opens to the public on 17 October — the culmination of a decades-long effort to revive the island that once housed Renault's flagship factory. The copper-and-aluminium building, designed by RCR Arquitectes with Calq, is the cultural centrepiece of Pointe des Arts, a €450m development that also includes a multiplex cinema, a hotel, a sculpture garden and shops. Visitors reach it across a 1920s blue metal footbridge from Boulogne-Billancourt, facing its gold-tinged, diamond-panelled façade. It is funded by the Emerige group of collector and developer Laurent Dumas, whose endowment fund backs the project. The inaugural exhibition, Moteur Imaginaire (Imaginary Engine), curated by Cecilia Alemani — director of High Line Art in New York and curator of the 2022 Venice Biennale — stages a dialogue between the historic Renault art collection and contemporary artists, with automobiles threaded through the display. The island's industrial past is inescapable: the factory employed more than 30,000 workers in the 1930s before closing in 1992, and the plant was demolished in 2005 after a string of failed redevelopment schemes, including a François Pinault foundation designed with Tadao Ando. Opening a week before Art Basel Paris, Large enters a crowded field alongside the Fondation Louis Vuitton and Pinault's Bourse de Commerce. Unlike those collector museums, it will mount a changing programme of temporary exhibitions rather than display a permanent collection — a test of whether the Paris art map can stretch beyond the périphérique.