Grand Palais

Landmark · Champs-Élysées (8th)Paris,France

A stone palace wrapped around a steel hall under Europe's largest glass roof, built for a world's fair on ground too soft to hold it.

The Grand Palais is a stone palace wrapped around a hall of steel and glass. The hall inside is what makes it remarkable: its glass roof is the largest in Europe, and the nave beneath runs to about thirteen and a half thousand square metres with nothing standing in the middle of it. Light comes down grey-white and even, so the whole space reads as one open volume rather than a room. Steel arches spring from the balcony level and meet more than forty metres overhead. It was built as the art pavilion of a world's fair, and it has been fighting its own ground ever since. The soil by the Seine turned out to be spongy, and the builders spent six months sinking timber ten metres down before they could start at all. The same fair left the smaller palace facing it, the bridge between them and the city's first Métro line, so you can walk the whole set in twenty minutes. Fire brought the ceiling down during the fighting for Paris in 1944. The building was shut as unsafe for years and reopened fully only recently; the nave now holds art fairs, exhibitions and concerts.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Part of the nave opens free between shows — no ticket, no booking, but it depends on what is being built or dismantled inside, so it is never guaranteed on the day.
Look up at the chariots on the roof — Georges Récipon modelled the two bronze four-horse teams in 1900, rearing out over the edge. You see them best from the far pavement.
A grey sky suits this building — The nave is lit entirely from above through glass, so an overcast sky gives an even white light that shows the ironwork better than direct sun.
The big shows decide how crowded it is — When a major art fair or show is in, the nave is packed and ticketed; in the weeks between, the same space can be almost empty.
The nave has been a hospital and a garage — It took wounded soldiers in the First World War and German army vehicles in the Second, and it has held motor shows, horse shows and Olympic fencing since.

Things to do

1
Stand in the middle of the empty nave and look up
Walk to the centre of the nave when nothing is installed and stop. The steel arches spring from the balcony level and meet more than forty metres over your head, and the glass above them carries no colour at all. Turn slowly. No wall is close enough to give you a sense of scale, and that is what makes the hall feel so vast.
2
Get close to a rivet
Go to where the steel comes down to the floor at the side of the nave and stand at a joint. Every beam here is made of flat plates laid over one another and pinned with rivets, short steel bolts hammered in while red hot, because nobody could weld steel on this scale in 1900. Their round heads stick out in rows.
3
See the whole front from the smaller palace opposite
Cross avenue Winston Churchill to the smaller palace built for the same fair and look back. From that pavement you see the whole north front at once: the screen of paired columns, the sculpture along the roofline, and the glass roof rising behind the stone. From there it is clear that the stone front and the glass hall are two different buildings on one site.