If you only had one day to see France, you’d be smart to take the Metro over to the Place du Trocadéro in Paris, near the Eiffel Tower, and spend it at the Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine. France’s principal architecture museum displays in the voluminous halls of the historic Palais de Chaillot a synoptic collection of monumental, full-scale Medieval and Renaissance fragments cast from the country’s most venerable buildings. With patinated surfaces that appear worn by time, the intricate casts, crowded with saints, are so convincing you have to peek around their backs to verify that the fragments are plaster and not stone. Viollet-le-Duc established the museum and its permanent collection in 1879.
If you go this month, however, you’re in for a double show. You’ll be issued a treasure map to the temporary exhibition Architects’ Furniture: 1960–2020 (open through September 30), for which the curators, headed by Lionel Blaisse in collaboration with Claire Fayolle, have sited nearly 300 often sassy, always spirited postwar pieces among the august monumental plaster fragments. The map guides you through three stories of great halls, intimate chapels, and dimly lit back passages to the modern and contemporary specimens interspersed throughout the museum.
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