The central nave
Brick arches and a high roof — space for monumental work.
Ardfern — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Captaintapas — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Thomon — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Thomon — CC BY-SA 4.0
Possibly yes, which is rare for a contemporary art museum. The reason is that **the building is itself a monument**: an 1824 warehouse of brick arches, stone piers and overhead light, a direct witness to Bordeaux's commercial and colonial history. Many visitors come for the space and leave having liked two or three works. Add that the **rooftop café** alone justifies going up. If contemporary art is genuinely not for you, come on a free day and spend twenty minutes walking the nave.
The museum sits on the edge of the **Chartrons**, the quarter that was the centre of the Bordeaux wine trade: the warehouses and houses of the Dutch, English and German merchants who dealt in the region's wine for centuries. Today it is one of the city's most characterful districts — antique and furniture shops, cafés and galleries, and the well-known **Chartrons Sunday market** on the riverside quay. Combine CAPC with a wander through the quarter and the nearby wine and trade museum, and you have a rounded half-day away from the crush of the centre.
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Here the building matters as much as what is in it. **CAPC** occupies the *Entrepôt Lainé*, a vast warehouse built in 1824 to store colonial goods arriving through the port — coffee, cotton, sugar, groundnuts. A huge central nave with a high roof, brick arches and stone piers, lit from above. When it became a museum in 1984 the building was left largely as it was: the arches were not boxed in and the walls were not whitewashed, so the **industrial space itself** became the frame. That gives large-scale work — installations and monumental sculpture — room of a kind conventional museums cannot offer. The collection covers art from the 1960s to the present with a European and French emphasis, but the strength is in the **large temporary exhibitions** built for the central nave. Above it a **rooftop café terrace** is one of the calmest spots in Bordeaux, and the same building houses **arc en rêve**, the architecture centre, which programmes its own exhibitions.
Brick arches and a high roof — space for monumental work.
Large projects built for the nave — the reason to come.
A quiet terrace above the museum.
7 Rue Ferrère, 33000 Bordeaux