French Museum Architecture

Museums are the mark of civilisation on a city. Whether repositories of the past or tools for communicating about the world around us, they play a vital part in cultural life, reaching out both to the local inhabitants and to visitors from around the world. Both showing and on show, presenting and representing, museums leave a lasting impression of a major city and can forge the reputation of lesser-known localities, literally putting them on the tourist map. As such, they are also architectural and urban symbols whose influence extends far beyond that of the collections they house, making the architect’s role a primary one.

France’s rich and varied museum offering ranges from establishments dating back to the late 17th century to groundbreaking structures still under construction. Some have transformed a prestigious historic edifice, while others have risen up as a brand new architectural creation on land reclaimed from the city. Designing a museum involves not only conceiving the best way to reveal their collections, but also how to welcome and serve visitors, and how to incorporate the spaces needed for the behind-the-scenes work of curating, restoring, cataloguing and storing. The architects embarking on such a project must carry out in-depth studies and find innovative solutions, whether their mission is to inject new life into a historic museum, to integrate a modern museography, to combine and harmonise an old building with a contemporary space, or to create from scratch a museum that will be acclaimed by critics and the public alike.

French Museum Architecture explores these different problematics through forty museum projects, ranging from the Orsay and Quai Branly museums in Paris, to the Lille Museum of Modern Art (LaM) and the Confluences Museum in Lyon, to name but a few. Each project is presented with the emphasis on the thought process behind the creation, exposing the main questions the architects had to address in order to come up with spaces that are efficient, intelligent, welcoming and dynamic, able to fulfil the expectations of a public ranging from academic researchers to the merely curious, and everyone in between.

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