The new museum, by Coop Himmelb(l)au, at the confluence of the Rhône and Saône Rivers in Lyon, France. Duccio Malagamba

Confluence Museum Opens in Lyon, France

This country games architecture a little like the way England plays rugby, with the intensity of a contact sport. When a major museum opens in one city, it’s an event with repercussions in others. People have opinions and take sides. They keep score. Perhaps it’s a cultural echo of Louis XIV and the glory of Versailles: In this country of enduring monuments, architecture matters.

This fall, the French cultural season opened with the private Vuitton Foundation museum in Paris, a rarefied environment for a select collection of contemporary art, by Frank Gehry. At the other end of the cultural spectrum,France’s second largest metropolitan area, Lyon — arguably Paris’s historic rival, the Chicago to New York — just inaugurated the equally large and prepossessing Confluence Museum (the Musée des Confluences).....Continue Reading

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