Musée D’Orsay : Art in a Train Station
How a former train station turned into one of the most visited museums in Paris
Paris — La nouvelle gare d’Orléans — public domain
We were in 1900, the city of Paris hosted the Universal Exhibition, which was at the time the showcase of a country. The idea was to show that the country was at the top level in terms of industrial, technical, and technological advances, especially in the context of the industrial revolution at the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th.
For this World’s Fair, the city of Paris decided, in order to bring more people to the capital, to build a new station on the left bank of the city that would allow the inhabitants of the southwest of France to arrive directly at the entrance of the exhibition. But obviously, with each new construction comes its share of problems. And here the problem was the architecture of the station itself. In fact, the Louvre museum was right across the Seine river, and it was judged that there was a problem of architectural harmony: the Louvre and its classical/Renaissance architecture & the new train station with its late 19th-century industrial architecture. The new train station didn’t fit with the classical architecture of the big building on the other side of the river. The contrast was too impressive and the metallic structure of the new station was not unanimously approved. It was…
