Musée du quai Branly

The Musée du quai Branly, renamed Musée du quai Branly Jacques Chirac in honour of the president who championed it, opened in 2006 beside the Seine a short walk from the Eiffel Tower. It brings together the collections of the old Musée de l'Homme and the Musée des Arts d'Afrique et d'Océanie, some three hundred thousand objects from Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas, of which about thirty-five hundred are shown at any time. Its purpose is to present these works as art and as evidence of living cultures, and its opening marked a shift in how France displays the material of its former colonies and trading partners.

Jean Nouvel's building is unlike any other museum in Paris. A long, curving body on stilts hovers over a wild garden by Gilles Clément, with coloured boxes projecting from its north face, a glass wall along the quay and a facade on the rue de l'Université covered by Patrick Blanc's vertical garden. Inside, a spiralling ramp climbs past a glass tower stacked with musical instruments to a single vast, dim gallery called the plateau des collections, where the four continents flow into one another with no walls between them. Leather-covered partitions, hanging screens and pools of light organise the space instead.

Give yourself time: the plateau is deliberately disorienting, and the best approach is to follow one continent and then wander. Temporary exhibitions on the mezzanines and the garden are worth the extra hour.