Parc de l'Ariana, Municipal park in Petit-Saconnex, Geneva, Switzerland
Parc de l'Ariana is a public garden in Geneva covering 28,000 m² around the Musée Ariana, which Gustave Revilliod built from 1877 to house his art collections. The park lies on the right bank of Lake Geneva, and since the Palais des Nations was built between 1929 and 1937, the museum and its grounds no longer have a direct view of the lake.
The property came to Geneva as a gift from the Revilliod de Rive family and was later designated for United Nations use. This connection shaped the park's role as an international space.
Gustave Revilliod named the museum after his mother; his 1890 will, displayed inside, requires that a blue peacock roam the park freely and that he be buried there. A bronze nude by Maurice Sarkissoff (1936) fills the niche above the basin, and three bronze cranes have stood in the main pool since 1980.
The public section around the Musée Ariana is reached from Avenue de la Paix, where the park was extended west in 1933 after two plots from the Petit-Morillon estate were added and linked by two flights of stairs. The museum and its immediate grounds stayed with the city in 1929, when about seven-eighths of the park went to the League of Nations. The gardens remain open to the public, as Gustave Revilliod's will required.
The bronze bell canopy in front of the museum recalls a Japanese temple bell cast in 1657 for Honsen-ji in Shinagawa. Gustave Revilliod bought it in 1873 from the Rüetschi foundry in Aarau, unaware of its origin; a Japanese student recognised it in 1919, and it was returned to Japan in 1930.
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