Museum architecture

Making architecture disappear

Philippe Robert’s task was to appreciate the difficulty of building a museum at a historic site. It was not about creating an imposing building – but making it as discreet as possible. It had to mesh with nature.

“We did a lot of hard work to make our architecture disappear. The biggest compliment would be to ask where our work is.”

Philippe Robert

The slope of the land and observation of Giverny’s houses inspired a meticulous system of terrace roofs. Philippe Robert designed a museum with a simple drawing: three juxtaposed rectangles creating fluid movement. The gradient of the roof is adapted depending on the natural angle of the hill. The discreet vertical windows illuminate the corridors between the exhibition rooms. For these, Philippe Robert opted for wood and windows in perspective. The building’s great triumph is to unite light and nature, strolling and softness. 

Bringing the outside in

The museum’s reception plays with transparency, with the large bay windows on one side and space and the garden on the other. On entering the lobby, the visitor can either go left to the exhibition galleries, or right to the shop or the restaurant which also overlooks the garden. To make the building functional, the architect created the technical spaces in the basement, but also the stockrooms, plus a pleasant auditorium. Today, with 180 places, it plays host to numerous conferences, concerts and readings. This building, devised in the late 1980s, was already ahead of its time in terms of defining the essential functions of a museum: welcoming the visitor, cultivating exhibitions, conserving and storing artwork, but also establishing a cultural policy for all audiences.