French Museum Architecture

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 an 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 problematic 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.