Bourse de Commerce: A Queen's Column and a Concrete Ring
Why is it significant?
Walk around this great round building until you find the odd thing stuck to its side: a tall, fluted stone column, standing alone, with an iron cage on top. It belongs to no temple and holds up nothing. It is the last survivor of a queen's palace.
Key Facts
| Place | Bourse de Commerce: A Queen's Column and a Concrete Ring |
|---|---|
| Address | 2 Rue de Viarmes, 75001 Paris, France |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.86280, 2.34280 |
| Part of Walk | Glass Roofs and Royal Secrets: From the Louvre to the Covered Passages of Paris |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk around this great round building until you find the odd thing stuck to its side: a tall, fluted stone column, standing alone, with an iron cage on top. It belongs to no temple and holds up nothing. It is the last survivor of a queen's palace.
In the 1570s Catherine de Medici built a mansion on this spot, and the column is all that remains of it. Nobody knows for certain what it was for. The story goes that the queen climbed it at night with her astrologer, Cosimo Ruggieri, to read her fate in the stars. It is a wonderful tale, and it may even be partly true.
In the 1760s the palace was gone and the city built a circular grain market here, the Halle au Blé, with a courtyard open to the sky. Then came a wooden dome, a fire, and in 1813 one of the first great iron domes in the world. In 1786 an American diplomat named Thomas Jefferson came to admire the wooden dome... and met a young painter, Maria Cosway, under it. He fell hopelessly in love, and that dome stayed in his mind as he imagined grand buildings for his own young country.
In 1889 the building became the commodities exchange, the Bourse de Commerce, and a huge painted frieze was added under the dome, showing trade across the continents. Then, after more than a century of commerce, the businessman and collector François Pinault took it on. The Japanese architect Tadao Ando slipped a smooth concrete cylinder inside the old rotunda, like a ring inside a ring, and the museum opened in 2021.
Inside, you can walk on top of that concrete wall and look up at the iron and glass dome from just below it. Four centuries of Paris are stacked here: a Renaissance queen, an Enlightenment market, an industrial dome, a twenty-first century gallery. Now cross the gardens to the east, where a cathedral-sized church rises over the old market district.