Cité de l'Architecture et du Patrimoine

Cité de l'Architecture et du Patrimoine Review

It took 10 years and $114 million to transform the City of Architecture and Heritage into one of the world's great architectural museums. Reopened in September 2007 to much fanfare, the former French Monuments Museum's three cavernous galleries (86,000 square feet) contain some 350 plaster-cast reproductions of the greatest gems of French architecture. Copies include partial facades of the most important gothic churches, massive carved doors, and the curved 16th-century staircase to the organ loft at St-Maclou church in Rouen. The famous stained-glass windows of the Chartres cathedral are represented, along with an assembly of gargoyles practically leaping off the back wall of the soaring first-floor gallery. Just below it is the door to an interactive room for children. The video-game set will love the video monitors, with joysticks, that allow a 360-degree view of some of the most impressive cathedrals. The upper-floor gallery is devoted to modern architecture, with models and video explainers of myriad building projects, as well as a life-size replica of a postwar apartment in Marseille designed by the urban-planning pioneer Le Corbusier. Don't miss the gallery of murals with stellar reproductions of frescoes and windows of medieval chapels and other buildings through the ages. Some critics have griped that reproductions are not so impressive in a country with plenty of the real thing, but this museum has nevertheless succeeded in amassing a fine "best of" collection under one roof. Leave between 1½ and 3 hours for a visit and spring for the €3 English "visioguide," an excellent audiovisual guide to the collection.