Musée du Quai Branly — Jacques Chirac

Opened in 2006 under President Jacques Chirac, whose name the museum now carries, the Musée du Quai Branly was built to give indigenous and non-European art and material culture a museum of its own scale and seriousness, rather than treating it as an ethnographic sideline to the fine-art museums. The building, designed by architect Jean Nouvel, is deliberately unconventional: raised on stilts above a wild garden, wrapped along one side by Patrick Blanc's pioneering vertical 'living wall' of plants, and organised internally as a winding, low-lit path rather than a conventional grid of galleries.

The collection — around 300,000 objects, with roughly 3,500 on permanent display — spans masks, textiles, musical instruments, ceremonial objects and sculpture from Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas, much of it drawn from the former Musée de l'Homme and Musée des Arts d'Afrique et d'Océanie collections, consolidated here to give the material a dedicated home.