Galerie des Machines

1889 · Steel Three Hinged Arch · Work 60 of 1,871

Galerie des Machines, 1889, Steel Three Hinged Arch

The Galerie des Machines on the Champ de Mars, three-hinged lattice trusses meeting at a pointed apex and narrowing to pin bearings at floor level, travelling gantries crossing overhead.

What it was used for
Machinery hall of the Paris World's Fair, 6 May to 31 October 1889, on the Champ de Mars; architect Ferdinand Dutert, engineer Victor Contamin. Twenty wrought-iron three-hinged arches, spanning 110.6 m between hinge axes (secondary literature gives up to 115 m; the 110.6 m comes from Henard's construction report of 1891), 421 m long, 46.7 m to the crown, some 12,800 tons of metal, 96.5 per cent of it wrought iron. The exhibition counted 32,250,297 visitors. Two electrically driven travelling bridges ran above the working machines, 18 m wide, seven metres above the floor, each carrying 150 to 200 people, about ten minutes per run, fare 50 centimes: the public watched the work from above. The hall with the largest column-free span of its time was demolished after barely twenty years, to clear the vista across the Champ de Mars. Whether in 1909 or 1910, the sources differ.
What was new
The three-hinged arch was nothing new in 1889; the German school had developed it through the Berlin gasworks building (1863, 32.95 m) and Berlin Ostbahnhof (1866, 36.25 m) to Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof (1887, 55.75 m). The leap was new: 110.6 m against the previous largest span of 73 m at St Pancras, half as much again. And the form inverts appearances - the arch is narrow at the bottom and lands on an almost point-like hinge, while it is deepest at the crown. The system is statically determinate and therefore insensitive to settlement and thermal expansion; it was designed for minus 15 to plus 35 degrees.

Connections

Every connection names its kind. “Forerunner” on its own would be a claim.

  1. EncounteredTour Eiffel1889The Galerie des Machines was the machine hall of the 1889 world's fair; visitors could cross it on travelling bridges suspended seven metres above the floor. On the same Champ de Mars stood the Eiffel Tower, built for this fair, which opened on 6 May 1889.Source: Bureau International des Expositions: Expo 1889 Paris

Further reading