Grand Palais: The Glass Nave of 1900
Why is it significant?
Stand back on the Avenue Winston Churchill and take in the façade: a long row of stone columns, mosaics glinting under the porch, and above it all a curved roof of glass and green steel. On the corners, bronze chariots seem ready to leap off the roof into the sky.
Key Facts
| Place | Grand Palais: The Glass Nave of 1900 |
|---|---|
| Address | 3 Avenue du Général Eisenhower, 75008 Paris, France |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.86620, 2.31220 |
| Part of Walk | Triumph and Guillotine: The Champs-Élysées from the Arc de Triomphe to Concorde, Paris |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand back on the Avenue Winston Churchill and take in the façade: a long row of stone columns, mosaics glinting under the porch, and above it all a curved roof of glass and green steel. On the corners, bronze chariots seem ready to leap off the roof into the sky.
The Grand Palais was built in just three years for the World's Fair of 1900, the exhibition that was supposed to sum up a century of progress. Outside, it is a classical palace of stone, to reassure. Inside, it is pure engineering, a single nave of iron and glass so big that it held horse shows, car shows and even aviation shows. When it opened, it was said to have the largest glass roof in Europe.
Its history was not only glamour. During the First World War the nave became a military hospital, its galleries full of beds for the wounded. In the Second World War the occupiers used it as a depot for trucks, and in August 1944, during the battle for the liberation of Paris, it caught fire. Then in 1993 a piece of the glass roof fell into the nave, and the great hall was closed for more than a decade of repairs.
Under the glass, the cars came back, then the art fairs, the fashion shows, even a full-size ice rink. Fashion houses have built entire forests and beaches inside for a single show. And in the summer of 2024, after a long restoration, the nave hosted the Olympic fencing, the swords clashing beneath the same glass that had sheltered the horses of 1900.
The bronze chariots on the roof are by Georges Récipon, and they show Immortality outrunning Time on one side, and Harmony triumphing over Discord on the other. Hard to think of a better motto for a building that keeps reinventing itself. Now cross the avenue to the smaller, golden-gated palace facing it.