Quai Branly Museum / Jean Nouvel

Article: Paco

Quai Branly Museum the last attempt to improbe much better, the Sena Bank, in the zone of Eiffel Tower. The plot where it’s built has beeen used in the mythical Universal exposition in the first days of XX Century and afterwards in 1937 one. The project was thought to house the huge humber of ethnography pieces from National Natural Museum, a unique building that gave a integral view of the native cultures from Micronesia, Asia, Africa, and South America

The complexity of this project began precisely with the objetive of show to the visitor a near vision of the exotism of this faraway cultures, without the typical academicist vision of the tradicional european Museums. So the Architect Jean Nouvel, decided to build a building surounded by green spaces and in fact he decided to have plants like constructive material of the north facace.

The green sheet extends by the river bank, with a great cristal panel, that enclose a big garden.the great central wedge of the visitable galleries appears behind this big green zone. This wedge it’s amazing thanks its huge lateral coloured cubes used in the museum, like small tematic rooms among the same collection.

Between the cubes, light get inside through big windows with a oblique grid that contrats with the orthogonality of the cubes.

This wedge that floats over some thick pillar, let the visitors pass to the main entrance below a structure of oblique planes that completes the floating base of the wedge bulding.

This Wedge building gets born, from a cylindrical main building, that would be the core of the complex. Here, the architect wanted “to get in flakes” this block making stand up the planes in a dinamic way to introduce the light inside it.

This standing up movements of these planes , steers us to the entrance of the cylindrical block, letting in the horyzon the Eiffel Tower Profile, between on the lateral Services building of the museum.

From the South side of the wedge we find and angular joint of the main two blocks that gives support the the principal Gallery.

Inside we find wide spaces, with a weak light, to show with strong focuses the big amount of big sized piezes, most of them from the Micronesia Colection. Easy to walk by, this visitor is the main actor of this museum, that can meet these incredible cultures shown with touchable TFT’s, with very easy interface. Some big seats made with a mud brown structure, give the posibility to the visitor of resting minutes listening traditional musics of this exotics cultures. A new nice place to walk, through this wonderful city.