1983 - The museum invests all the spaces

At the initiative of Jacqueline du Pasquier (1972-2000), curator of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, a major restructuring project was launched. It concerns the commons wing, the attic of the mansion and the old prison. After 5 years of work, the museum reopened in 1983. The legitimist collection of the Bordelais artist Raymond Jeanvrot (1886-1966) is now presented in four dedicated rooms. In the commons wing, new spaces allow for temporary exhibitions, particularly dedicated to the young generation of designers. Visitors discover a part of the collection of weapons, locks and ironworks, in the attic, an area formerly reserved for domesticity.

At the same time, the prison becomes a reserve. Recently freed from the activities of the municipal police, its rooms and courtyards allow to keep, closer to the teams, the museum’s collections which do not find their place in the itinerary imagined within the mansion. The direction of this important project is entrusted to the C.A.F.E. programming firm, directed by the museologist Claude Pecquet and the architect Patrick O'Byrne, who in 1974 had worked on the establishment of the Georges Pompidou Centre. The architecture firm Alain Rodriguez & Bernard Bourgeois is taking care of the works.

This architectural reconfiguration, particularly that of the prison, is part of the continuity of the reflections conducted at the origin of the first museum projects in these buildings. Indeed, as early as 1918, the City envisaged the creation of a Museum of Industrial Art, by building new spaces on the site of the prison or by investing its courtyards and cells. Only the project of the Ancient Art Museum succeeded, but the destination of the prison remained pending. The wish of the curators was then to make a reserve for the collections: a wish shared by Jacqueline du Pasquier which was thus fulfilled a few decades later.