The Grand Palais Éphémère, completed in 2021 as a short-term replacement, hosts events like art shows and concerts, and will house competitions for the 2024 Olympics.
The history of Paris’s Champs de Mars — the green expanse stretching from the École Militaire (the neo-Classical-style military academy where Napoleon, among others, studied) to the Eiffel Tower — is filled with temporary structures.
Throughout the late-19th and early-20th centuries, Universal Expositions on this site produced extraordinary, short-lived cities consisting of pavilions, palaces, houses, monuments, fountains, bridges, paths, and grand esplanades. A few “temporary” constructions — the most famous, of course, being the Eiffel Tower itself — would even become permanent.
The Grand Palais Éphémère, the temporary building at the south end of the Champs de Mars hosting Paris+ by Art Basel, renews this tradition. It was completed in 2021 as a short-term replacement for the under-renovation Grand Palais, a massive — and massively ornate — Beaux-Arts structure on the other side of the Seine River that was itself built for the 1900 Universal Exposition.
The “ephemeral” replacement — which hosts events like art shows and concerts and will house sporting events for the upcoming Paris 2024 Olympics — is shaped like a cross. Its rounded vaults are supported by 44 wood arches, composed of rigid triangular trusses, wrapped in a tightly stretched skin of clear durable plastic, ethylene tetrafluoroethylene (ETFE), and PVC vinyl fabric (a flexible plastic). The open, column-free edifice can offer more than 100,000 square feet of uninterrupted space or adapt to events with temporary walls.
The building’s curved form takes its cues from the Grand Palais’s barreled ceilings and crossed nave (not to mention the curved roofline of the École Militaire, and the latticed supporting arches of the Eiffel Tower), while being a resolutely modern reinterpretation — stripped down to pure structure and cladding.
Fitting gently into the Champs de Mars, a revered location for France, its crossed naves measure about 490- and 460-feet long. The vaulted roof reaches 65 feet, preserving views of the taller École Militaire. The building even incorporates the site’s famed statue of Marshal Joseph Joffre, a commander in chief of the French Army during World War I, who stands just inside the glass fronted south facade.
The building’s silhouette may be simple, but its architect, Jean-Michel Wilmotte, and his team at Wilmotte & Associates had to tackle endless challenges, not the least of which was an intimidatingly tight design and construction timeline of nine months. The Palais’s wood frame segments were prefabricated in a factory, allowing its skeleton to be assembled on site in just three months.
To navigate a high water table under the edifice without disturbing the site, workers had to drive thin piles for extra support. And to keep the structure from feeling like a drafty, echo-filled circus tent, they layered several materials into the inner skin, including mineral fiber insulation, plasterboard, and fabric. A system of warm and cool air vents is controlled by a remote technical room next to the building. And sustainability is enhanced via (among other solutions) sustainably harvested wood, embedded solar panels, and mineral-based plastics.
Mr. Wilmotte, 75, has long been recognized for deftly mixing history and modernity. Among his firm’s dozens of projects are the 1910 Hotel Lutetia in Paris’s Sixth Arrondissement, layering vibrant new details, like bold furniture and bronze finishes, with carefully restored, and rediscovered existing ones, like frescoes that had been hidden behind layers of paint and a glass ceiling once lost behind layers of grime, augmented with a colorful glass art piece.
His Station F, near the Francois Mitterrand Library, converted a vaulted concrete warehouse into a unique start-up campus by cutting out linear skylights, installing a mix of uses, and inserting “villages” of open maker spaces and modular glass and steel work spaces.
“I’m so happy to create a dialogue between contemporary and historical elements,” Mr. Wilmotte said. “We can mix old stone with new stone; old wood with new wood. I like to combine them, but I also like to oppose them. When you design contemporary besides historical you upgrade. The contemporary elements are never lost. I think both of them win.”
Mr. Wilmotte knew he could pull off a modern, temporary structure at the history-filled Champs de Mars because he had in fact done it before. In 2000 he designed, with the artist Clara Halter, the Wall of Peace, an installation on the same site as the Grand Palais Éphémère composed of stainless steel columns and large glass panels engraved with the word peace in 49 languages. That project, intended to be taken down after six months, remained for 20 years.
The Grand Palais Éphémère, which replaced that piece, also has an expected shelf life — in this case not long after the Paris Olympics. But already, Mr. Wilmotte said, some are pushing to keep it longer, including the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, who was an early critic. “It’s possible it could become permanent,” he added. “People love it because it’s so flexible. One day, you can open it for horses to perform and the next day you can host Paris +.”
He said that mayors around France are inquiring about getting their own versions. He’s open to whatever form that could take — but preferably it’s something different. Trained in both design and architecture, he’s just as happy working on a doorknob or chair as he is on a train station or a city-scale master plan.
“I have one specialty — I never do the same thing twice,” he said. “I’m always trying to do something new. To understand something new.”
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