November 2008

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The Metro marks the spot. The Palais du Trocadéro was built for the Paris 1879 Exposition Universelle, a full decade before the Eiffel Tower rose directly across the Seine. In the 1930s the great pot-bellied palace, designed in pick ‘n’ mix franco-romano-saraceno style, and by then redundant, was razed to the ground. The arms of this corpulent body, however, survived and were encased in the contemporary architectural equivalent, bombastic stripped classicism with art deco trimmings, this time for the 1937 Exposition Internationale. The renamed Palais de Chaillot incorporated a theatre and museums, one of which was the Musée National des Monuments Français, a formerly international collection of architectural and sculptural casts. Now with its 19th-century iron-and-glass-roofed galleries once more exposed to view, it forms the core of the new Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine.

The choice of name is telling, for such an ambitious undertaking, involving several institutions, a number of functions and inevitably attracting widely varied audiences, is not a seamless whole – nor perhaps could it ever be. Despite a history of interdisciplinary tensions, exacerbated by political changes and interference, as well as the setback of a serious fire in the late 1990s, against the odds the Cité finally opened to the public late in 2007.

Viollet-le-Duc initiated the museum of casts, which opened in 1882 (three years after his death) with almost 400 exhibits, having as his objective both a chronology of French architecture and sculpture and a comparison of these masterpieces with foreign work, a kind of 3d encyclopédie. As early as 1867, Henry Cole at the South Kensington Museum had organised a pan-European museum agreement for the exchange of casts; Prince Jérôme Bonaparte (Napoleon’s young brother) signed for France. But by 1937, the country was in nationalistic mood and all memories of old international understandings were gone; the display showed visitors a neat lineage of architectural and ornamental styles untouched by foreign influences. The resplendent display reopened in 2007 further emphasises that strict chronology and remains resolutely French.

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