The gallery of casts
The Chartres portal and Vézelay carvings at eye level.
Architecture Patrimoine — CC BY-SA 3.0 · 4net — CC BY 3.0 · Hadonos — CC BY-SA 4.0
The third museum in the **Palais de Chaillot** at Trocadéro, and the strangest in conception and the most astonishing to anyone who walks in without expecting it. Its heart is the **gallery of casts**: an enormous high-ceilinged hall filled with **full-size** replicas of façades, portals, columns and sculpture from French cathedrals, churches and palaces across a thousand years. The casts were made in the nineteenth century on the instruction of the architect **Viollet-le-Duc** to record and teach the architectural heritage, before modern means of documentation existed. The result is that you stand before the portal of Chartres cathedral or the carvings of Moissac or Vézelay **close up and at eye level** — where in reality they sit at heights from which no detail is visible. Some of these casts have become more valuable than their originals, preserving the state of the original a century and a half before erosion and war. Above it is a floor on **modern and contemporary architecture**, holding a full-scale replica of a **Le Corbusier apartment** from the Unité d'Habitation in Marseille, which you enter and walk through. ⚠ Its windows look directly onto the **Eiffel Tower**.
The Chartres portal and Vézelay carvings at eye level.
A full replica of the Marseille Unité apartment you walk into.
The Eiffel Tower directly from inside the galleries.
For three practical reasons. **First**: this sculpture sits on cathedral façades at heights from which no detail is visible — here you stand at eye level and see what a visitor to Chartres itself cannot. **Second**: the originals are scattered across dozens of French towns; here they are in one hall to compare. **Third**, and most importantly: the casts were made in the nineteenth century, so they preserve **the original as it was 150 years ago**, before pollution, erosion and war — and some of their detail no longer exists on the original stone.
They share **one building** — the Palais de Chaillot — at the Trocadéro metro stop, which makes the site one of the most efficient in Paris: the **Cité de l'Architecture**, the **Musée de l'Homme** and the **Musée de la Marine**, with the **free terrace** and its famous Eiffel Tower view between them. All three in one day is exhausting; the realistic plan is **two** in a day with a break on the terrace. Ask about **combined tickets**, and check the closing days — they do not necessarily match across the three.
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1 Place du Trocadéro, 75116 Paris
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