Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine

Art

/ Museums

Published on Thursday, 19 February 2009 19:09

Written by Heidi Ellison

Architecture Housed in New Building

The model for Christian de Portzamparc's Cidade da Musica Roberto Marinho, currently being built near Rio de Janeiro. © Atelier Christian de Portzamparc

After squatting the Palais de la Porte Dorée for some time, the formerly homeless Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine is now more comfortably installed on the other side of Paris in the Palais de Chaillot.

To inaugurate this impressive new home for its temporary galleries last March, the Cité put
together an equally impressive exhibition, “Portzamparc: Rever la Ville,” set up in a grand gallery of exposed stone with a round-vaulted ceiling.

Here, for once, is an architecture museum that makes architecture accessible and fully enjoyable to non-specialists.

The Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine incorporates a number of previously separate entities: the Institut Français de l’Architecture, the Musée des Monuments Français (which reopened in September with an additional gallery presenting French architecture from 1850 to the present), the Ecole de Chaillot for postgraduate studies (and now, courses in architectural history for the public), and a library and documentation center.

Heidi Ellison

Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine: Palais de Chaillot, 1, place du Trocadéro, 75016 Paris. Métro: Trocadéro. Tel.: 01 58 51 52 00. Open Monday, Wednesday and Friday, 11 a.m.-7 p.m.; Thursday, 11 a.m.-9 p.m.; Saturday-Sunday, 11 a.m.-7 p.m. Closed Tuesday. www.citechaillot.fr

© 2007 Paris Update

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