Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac

Museum · Gros-Caillou, Eiffel Tower quarter (7th)Paris,France

A Paris museum on stilts behind a wall of fifteen thousand living plants, its dim halls holding objects from Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas.

The Musée du quai Branly stands on stilts above the Seine embankment, its river façade covered by a wall of fifteen thousand living plants. Inside, a long ramp curls up from the entrance hall and the light drops as you climb; at the top the dark does not lift. Low light protects what is on show — wood, bark, feather and cloth from Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas. There are no walls between the four continents, so one runs into the next. A glass tower in the middle holds ten thousand musical instruments on six levels. The museum holds about three hundred thousand objects and shows three and a half thousand at a time — roughly one piece in a hundred, so what you see is a choice somebody made. The building is a choice too: Nouvel lifted the galleries ten metres off the ground so a garden could run underneath, and you walk in beneath the whole thing. The collections came from two older Paris museums, one of them a colonial museum. Some objects have left for good. Twenty-six royal works went back to Benin in 2021, and the argument about the rest has not finished.

Worth knowing

Good to know

The plant wall and the garden cost nothing — The wall stands on the public pavement of quai Branly, and the garden under the building is free to walk into.
Run your hand along the leather band called the River — This padded band curves through the collections floor, carrying braille and raised pictures made to be read with the fingers.
Walk round to rue de l'Université for the painted building — Eight Aboriginal Australian artists were commissioned to paint that block's façade and ceilings when the museum was built, and the work faces an ordinary Paris street.
Cross the riverside road for the whole shape — From the far pavement the gallery looks like a long bridge standing on legs, with coloured boxes sticking out of its side.
Lifts reach every level, so the ramp is optional — The museum directs visitors who need step-free access to its entrance at 222 rue de l'Université.

Things to do

1
Study one small patch of the living wall
Stand on the pavement close enough to see the grey felt the plants are rooted in, and choose a patch the size of your hand. Count how many different leaf shapes are in it. Then look at the foot of the wall, where ferns grow in the damp, and at the top, where plants that need sun take over.
2
Walk the spiral ramp slowly into the dark
The ramp climbs in one long curve from the entrance hall to the collection floor, and the light gets dimmer the whole way up. Projected words slide across the ramp as you walk. They are the names of every people and place in the collections, more than sixteen thousand of them. Climb at half speed, so that your eyes have adjusted to the dark before you reach the first objects.
3
Find an instrument you cannot name
A glass tower runs up through the middle of the collection floor, and it holds the museum's store of musical instruments on open shelves. Drums, harps, flutes and horns stand row above row. Pick one level, follow it round, and find three shapes you have no word for.
4
Stand under the museum among the grasses
The gallery block stands ten metres up on columns, and Gilles Clément's garden carries on underneath it. Walk in under the building and look up at its underside, then out through the tall glass screen along the street, which keeps the traffic on the quay at a distance. The planting under there is left tall and untrimmed.