Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac

Listen for a moment. The traffic on the riverside road is still there, but it sounds softer now. A tall wall of glass stands between you and the street. Behind it, tall grasses and young trees move in the wind. The ground under your feet changes from hard pavement to gravel and earth. In a city of stone, you have walked into a kind of small wild wood, a few minutes from the Eiffel Tower.

This is the Musée du Quai Branly, renamed in honour of Jacques Chirac. It opened in 2006, and it holds one of the largest collections in Europe of art from Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas. The building came from a political idea. Chirac was the French president at the time, and he wanted a major Paris museum for the arts of cultures outside Europe. That ambition shaped everything you are about to see.

The objects did not arrive from nowhere. Much of the collection came from two older Paris institutions. One was the ethnographic department of the Musée de l'Homme, the museum of humankind. The other was a national museum for the arts of Africa and Oceania. Bringing them together under one roof was a difficult decision. Some people saw it as a celebration of these cultures. Others worried that it took the objects away from their scientific context. That debate never fully disappeared.

The architect was Jean Nouvel, one of France's best-known contemporary designers. Look at how the main building sits. It does not press down on the ground. Instead, it rests on slim columns, high above the garden. The trees grow underneath and around it. Nouvel wanted the architecture to step back, almost to hide among the plants. Walk a few steps and notice that you can never see the whole building at once from inside the garden.

Now turn toward the river side of the museum. Here is a detail many visitors miss. Dozens of coloured boxes stick out from the long façade. They are red, orange, ochre and brown, and each one is a different size. From outside they look like drawers pulled half open. Inside the museum, each box becomes a small, quiet room for a specific group of objects. It is a playful idea, and it gives the long building a broken, uneven rhythm.

The garden itself deserves your attention. It was designed by the landscape architect Gilles Clément. He is known for a gentle, loose style of gardening that lets plants grow with some freedom. Here there are no neat French lawns and no straight lines of clipped hedges. Paths curve. Small ponds catch the light. In different seasons, the grasses turn green, gold, then pale brown. For many local people, this garden is a reason to come back, even without visiting the galleries.

If you walk along the street side of the museum, you will find a second surprise. The office building there is covered with a living wall. Thousands of plants grow straight up the façade, with no soil bed at the bottom. This vertical garden is the work of the botanist Patrick Blanc, who made the technique famous. Stand back and look at the texture. Ferns, mosses and leafy plants form a thick green surface, and it changes from month to month.

Now, inside. The entrance leads you onto a long white ramp that climbs slowly toward the collections. It curves, and the light is low. Projected words and shapes often move across the floor, so the ramp feels like a passage rather than a corridor. This is deliberate. The designers wanted you to leave the city behind before you meet the first object. Take your time here. Let your eyes adjust to the darkness ahead.

The main gallery is one huge, open space. There are few walls. Instead, a low, curving wall covered in leather runs through the room like a long snake. The light is dim, because many objects are fragile, and because Nouvel wanted a mood of mystery. Masks, carved figures, textiles and musical instruments appear out of the shadows. You move from one region of the world to another without a door between them.

Only a small part of the collection is on display at any time. The museum keeps hundreds of thousands of objects, and only a few thousand appear in the permanent galleries. The rest are kept in storage, or shown in temporary exhibitions that change through the year. Look especially for the glass tower near the centre of the building. It holds a large collection of musical instruments, stored in plain view, like a library of sound.

This museum is also part of a serious conversation. Many of its objects left their home countries during the colonial period, and some were taken by force. In 2021, France returned a group of royal treasures from the old Kingdom of Dahomey to Benin, in West Africa. Those objects had been held here. The question of what should go home, and to whom, is still open. You may see it discussed in labels and exhibitions as you walk.

Before you leave, look up at the buildings around the garden. On some ceilings and walls, you can find large painted works by Australian Aboriginal artists. Aboriginal means the first peoples of Australia. These paintings are made of dots, lines and patterns that carry stories about land and ancestors. Their place on the outside of the building is unusual. Here, the art is not shut inside a gallery. It is part of the architecture itself.

So take one last look around you. Behind the glass wall, the city carries on. In the garden, the grasses still move, and the coloured boxes still catch the light. Somewhere above you, a carved figure made far from Paris stands in the dark. As you walk out toward the river, listen again to the traffic. Then look up. The Eiffel Tower is right there, close enough to remind you how much of the world this small wood holds.