Quai Branly Museum

The Musee du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac is France's national museum for the arts and cultures of Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas, opened in 2006 close to the Eiffel Tower. President Jacques Chirac, a personal collector of East Asian art, pushed the project through against considerable resistance; the museum gathers holdings from the dissolved Musee de l'Homme and the Musee national des Arts d'Afrique et d'Oceanie. Jean Nouvel designed a building tucked behind a 200-metre glass screen along the Seine, with an 800-square-metre vertical garden by Patrick Blanc covering the street facade. Inside, a curving ramp leads past Maori carvings, Yoruba bronzes and Aztec masks into the main level. The layout follows aesthetic rather than ethnographic logic, deliberately so.