Grand Palais
1900 · Steel Arch with Glass Vault · Work 62 of 1,871
The Grand Palais nave in Paris, riveted steel arches carrying a glazed barrel vault above the crossing, the double staircase with its curling wrought iron balustrade climbing to the galleries.
- What it was used for
- Exhibition building for the 1900 World's Fair, put up in only three years from 1897 on the site of the Palais de l'Industrie of 1855. It opened to the public on 16 May 1900. The ground by the Seine would not carry it: some 3,400 oak piles were driven, 300 to 400 blows each, for six months day and night. From 1901 the motor show and equestrian competitions used the building; in the First World War it was a military hospital - the first wounded arrived on 1 October 1914, 400 people worked there, room 7 alone held 240 beds, and it closed in June 1919. The piles became the building's undoing: as the Paris water table fell they dried out and partly disappeared. In June 1993 a rivet fell 35 metres into the nave, which was closed that November; the repair from 2001 to 2006 cost 101.36 million euros.
- What was new
- What was new about this building was not the hall but its covering: a steel skeleton with a glazed barrel vault, wrapped on the outside in a stone facade in the academic manner. It was built by the four prizewinners of the 1896 competition - Deglane, Louvet, Thomas and Girault - who had competed against one another and then had to work together. The barb is in the oldest part of the building. All of it rests on some 3,400 oak piles, and oak piles hold only as long as they stand under water. The rivet that fell in 1993 was the alarm; the works that followed were officially titled first "Confortation des fondations", the securing of the foundations, and only then glazing, steelwork and roof. Renewed were 700 tonnes of steel and 14,900 square metres of the nave's glass - and the ground beneath: 9,200 square metres of diaphragm walls, 2,500 cubic metres of concrete bases, 30,000 linear metres of drilling.