Founded in October 2013, Lafayette Anticipations – Fondation d'entreprise Galeries Lafayette will open in 2017 in the Marais district of Paris. A multidisciplinary center dedicated to production, transmission, active sharing, and exhibitions, it will first and foremost be a place of experimentation and fundamental research, offering artists, designers, fashion designers, and performers conditions and tools for developing prototypes and implementing projects. Significantly, Lafayette Anticipations has asked Rem Koolhaas/OMA to renovate a former 19th-century building and to conceive a new kind of artistic venue and curatorial tool dedicated to its core mission: production.

Stemming from the pre-opening program begun in October 2013 and concluded in October 2016 with the collective exhibition "Joining Forces With the Unknown," this publication brings together never-published-before visual material dedicated to a large number of events organized and/or hosted by Lafayette Anticipations as well as newly commissioned texts and conversations by highly recognized international art professionals and thinkers. It provides the opportunity to revisit the moments leading up to the opening of this institution-as-laboratory, but also to discuss and anticipate the stakes of artistic production and social and cultural change in the 21st century.

Contributors include Howard Becker, Neil Cummings, Chris Dercon, Lidewij Edelkoort, RoseLee Goldberg, Rem Koolhaas, Franck Leibovici, François Quintin, and Judith Wielander & Matteo Lucchetti. The artists' portfolios are dedicated to Anja Aronowsky Cronberg, Ulla von Brandenburg, Compagnie Mùa/Emmanuelle Huynh, Paul Kneale & Raphael Hefti, Simon Fujiwara, Olaf Nicolai, Rotor, Jerszy Seymour, Gabriel Sierra, Editathon Art+Feminism/Flora Katz, and Anicka Yi. The book is designed by Yorgo & Co. (Paris). Its cover has been commissioned to Raphael Hefti and conceived in collaboration with the printer.