Jean Nouvel's museum building
Jean Nouvel (born 1945) · 2001 to 2006
From the quay the museum looks like a long ship or a huge coloured caterpillar resting on thin legs above a thicket of trees. A twelve-metre glass wall runs along the street, hiding the garden and cutting the traffic noise, and behind it the main body of the building curves gently for more than two hundred metres. On the north face, thirty boxes in ochre, red and brown push out from the wall like drawers left open, each one a small gallery inside. The whole thing is lifted on stilts so that the garden flows underneath, and at night the underside glows with coloured light.
Jean Nouvel won the competition in 1999 and set out to make a building that disappeared behind the objects it held. He talked of a place of shadow and mystery rather than a white palace, and once you go inside the choice is clear: the lobby is bright, the ramp spirals upward in half-light and the main gallery is dim and warm. Look at how few straight lines there are, how the exterior materials, including rusted steel, wood and painted glass, avoid the look of a monument, and how the coloured boxes, from inside, become alcoves where a single group of objects can be shown in intimacy.
The museum was the great cultural project of President Jacques Chirac, a collector of non-European art who wanted these works recognised on equal terms with Western art; his name was added to the museum's title in 2016. The building was controversial when it opened in 2006, criticised by some as theatrical and by others as treating the collections as a jungle, and it has aged into one of the most distinctive pieces of architecture in Paris. Walk right round it, along the garden path and up to the rue de l'Université, to see how differently each side behaves.
Did You Know? The thirty coloured boxes on the north facade are small galleries; from inside each one is a dim alcove for a single group of objects.
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