Environs

Through its association with the river, Docks en Seine fleshes out the capital’s urban cultural and public landscape to the east:
From the Fashion and Design Centre it takes just a few minutes by metro to reach the Georges Pompidou Centre, whose bright colours echo the green arborescence one has just left. Travel time to the Louvre by public transport is just as short. Unless one prefers to follow the river upstream on foot, serenely ambling from one historic site to another. Neither does it take much time to get from Docks en Seine to the Decorative Arts Museum, another venue where fashion is a familiar story. Within the close vicinity one also finds the Jeu de Paume and Orangerie Museums rising out of the Tuileries Garden, as opportunities to establish links among design, modern art and contemporary art.

Let us return to the banks of the Seine. One makes one’s way in short order from the Fashion Centre to the Grand Palais. Head on and in profile, the glass casing of this famous edifice is as monumental and as classical as the former Magasins Généraux are long and endowed with aesthetics worthy of the digital age. Green and mignonette in the one case, pantone 376 C in the other, their hues form a lovely cameo with the river. Finally, just a sliver of eternity gets you to Trocadéro by bus, metro, bicycle, car or rollerblades: the prestigious Galliera Museum of Fashion is half way up the slope. Just a bit further up you have the Modern Art Museum and the Palais de Tokyo, next to one another like fraternal twins. Once there, you stretch your curiosity by trying to catch a glimpse of the Docks en Seine vegetation covered terrace from the esplanade. Thirty minutes have been enough to make the rounds of West Paris, from the Fashion and Design Centre, with the Heritage and Architecture Centre at the finish line.

But let us go back up the Left Bank to the previous age of the Musée des Arts Premiers. Its vegetation covered façade is like an echo of Docks en Seine. The perfect straight line joining these two structures is but a short distance. Less than ten minutes later you reach the Orsay Museum. This former train station, transformed into a point of departure for impressionist landscapes, brings you even closer to the Austerlitz railway tracks, for which Docks en Seine is a close neighbour. To finish the tour, pickup a Paris Velib bicycle and glide by the Arab World Institute: angular, geometric, open to other cultures through its thousand and one moucharabys, it whets our appetite to know what is hidden inside. The stroller next discovers the promise of the beautiful arborescence of Docks en Seine, sunning itself with its feet in the water of the Seine. Less than a fine afternoon has been enough time to go West and to come back.

Never far away, Docks en Seine entrusts its destiny to the patronage of grand sites.