cultural blah blah.com

The Musée du Quai Branly, recently designed by architect Jean Nouvel, houses an amazing selection of arts and artifacts of civilizations from Africa, Asia, the Americas and more. The building itself does what in today’s world can be described as an unusually terrific job in housing the collection. By this I mean that most museums today are architecturally beautiful from the outside but in the inside all you see is white walls and a stale atmosphere. Take for example the Moma in New York or the Centre Pompidou in Paris, both museums with extremely interesting exteriors housing beautiful collections but with no story to tell. When entering Nouvel’s building you get the sense that every detail was thought out and designed by the architect, everything from the colors of the exteriors to the glass column in the center of the main part of the museum that holds a part of the museum’s collection of ancient instruments for everyone to see and that goes through every floor of the building. I would also like to point out that the museum also houses a very beautiful library that is worth the visit. As mentioned before many of today’s museums are built without the actual works in mind. They are designed by architects to make a statement in an architectural language but not tell a story. Jean Nouvel did an amazing job of creating a building that would come together with the work it houses and tells the story that it’s meant to tell. I highly recommend visiting the Musée du Quai Branly even if you are a novice in this specific art world like myself. For more information: http://www.quaibranly.fr