Le Musée du Grand Siècle, site de la caserne Sully

The Musée du Grand Siècle is housed within the former royal barracks of the town of Saint-Cloud. As finalist in this major competition for a departmental cultural facility, the museum architect enhances the historic Charles X buildings and the Officers’ Pavilion, which accommodates the research centre. A contemporary pavilion for events completes the ensemble. The heritage building renovation displaying a major collection of paintings, drawings and the Rosenberg library, which reflects the grandeur of the 17th century.

The listed building architect establishes a clear organizational logic, through the distribution of program elements legible across the site. Permanent exhibitions and the Collectors’ Cabinet are integrated in the Charles X building; the Nicolas Poussin research centre occupies the Officers’ Pavilion; temporary exhibitions and educational spaces are set within the cloister base; and an event hub — comprising an auditorium, restaurant, and café — is housed in the contemporary pavilion. The museum architect redefines the relationships between landscape and courtyard interventions, while respecting the historic layout, opening framed views towards the Seine River and the Parc de Saint-Cloud.

The new contemporary building is conceived by the museum architect as a garden pavilion with a lightweight structural system. Developed over two levels, it is defined by slender columns and large glazed façades, reinforcing a sense of lightness and spatial continuity. The heritage building renovation engages in dialogue with the cloister — drawn from 17th-century abbey typologies — composed of a planted garden flanked by two covered galleries. This intimate space, together with the contemporary pavilion, forms a key architectural and landscape component of the museum.

To highlight the richness of the collections, the museum architect reinterprets, in a contemporary way, the key spatial typologies of 17th-century architecture: the grand gallery, the Italian-style salon, devotional spaces, cloisters and pavilion structures.