MUSÉE DES CONFLUENCES, LYON

The Musée des Confluences in Lyon was designed by the Austrian architectural firm Coop Himmelb(l)au and it was completed in 2014.

The museum gets its name from the site where it is built which is the confluence of the two rivers which run through Lyon: the Saône and the Rhône. The museum itself is a natural history & anthropology museum.

Various viewpoints of the confluence from the museum

The building is a very layered design. It is sculptural but also plays a lot with framing views over Lyon. It is incredibly transformative as you move around it, telling many different visual stories.

The building also has details which I love such as the manipulation of a ‘grid’ or ‘net’ like elevation surface, where in places the grid units are doubled, extended or even, at the upper part, skewed or projected into the 3^rd dimension. Most of the grid units are opaque cladding, but in other parts they are transparent windows.

However, at the front part of the building this ‘grid’ is entirely glazed meaning each unit of the grid is an opening window. A number of windows were open when I visited creating a ‘fish scale’ effect.