The nave of the Grand Palais is ready for the Olympic Games (OG). After three years of fast-paced construction, Paris 2024 has invested in this grandiose volume where the fencing and taekwondo events will be held from the end of July. The work has taken a slight delay in the adjoining galleries, but, at the end of May, everything will be finished, assures Daniel Sancho, the project director for the Réunion des musées nationaux (RMN), project manager of the vast operation to rehabilitate the Big palace. “This will be more than enough to put in place the required arrangements in these spaces which will accommodate the training and pre-warming rooms, the room for anti-doping tests, the security PC installations…”.
Once the event is over, the construction site will begin its final phase, which will lead to the reopening of the national galleries (delivery planned for June 2025) and the Palais de la Découverte (in 2026). On an architectural level, the stakes of the operation are already fully perceptible. Above all, it is about revealing to itself this jewel of the Belle Epoque that was the Grand Palais at the time of its inauguration, in 1900, as part of the Universal Exhibition.
Rediscover the splendor of yesteryear
Emblematic of the Beaux-Arts style, just like the Petit Palais opposite it or the Alexandre-III bridge, two buildings also designed for the 1900 Universal Exhibition, this Grand Palais is a strange monument. An asymmetrical arrangement of three distinct buildings, but connected to each other (the nave, the Palais d’Antin, where the Palais de la Découverte was located in 1936, and the “intermediate building”), the design of which required the collaboration of no less than four architects (Henri Deglane, Louis-Albert Louvet, Albert Thomas and Charles Giraud). It has survived two wars, withstood a fire, a demolition project, as well as the drop in the level of the bed of the Seine, which for a time endangered its foundations…
Various work campaigns have made it possible to keep it in activity, but, in one hundred and twenty years of existence, decorum has taken a turn for the worse. Notwithstanding its fabulous glass roof – the largest in Europe to this day – the building gradually turned into an obscure mess whose composition gradually became illegible. Rediscovering the splendor of yesteryear and restoring its coherence to the place were the two main axes of the project, which also aimed to bring the building up to standards and make it an efficient machine, adapted to the needs and uses of the current period.
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