Photo : Architecture Patrimoine / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Cité de l'architecture et du patrimoine
The Cité de l'architecture et du patrimoine occupies the Paris wing of the Palais de Chaillot, Place du Trocadéro, in Paris. Opened in 2007, it claims, with more than 22,000 m², the status of the largest architecture centre in the world. Its mission is to make French architecture known, in France and abroad, its emblematic works and international contemporary creation.
Its permanent collection is divided into three great galleries. The Gallery of Casts, heir to the Museum of Comparative Sculpture founded in 1879 by Viollet-le-Duc, presents large-scale casts of portals and façades of cathedrals and French buildings, from the twelfth to the eighteenth century. Another gallery is devoted to wall paintings and stained glass. The modern and contemporary architecture gallery offers notably the reconstruction of an apartment of Le Corbusier's Cité Radieuse in Marseille.
The Cité also organises temporary exhibitions, lectures and workshops. It is aimed at architecture lovers as well as families and the curious, and also offers a fine viewpoint over the Eiffel Tower from the Trocadéro.
