Machine shop Paris
A total of three exhibition pavilions made of iron and glass, which were created on the occasion of the Paris World Expos of 1867, 1878 and 1889, were referred to as the machine hall or French Gallery des Machines .
The hall from 1878, the work of the architect Henri de Dion (1828–1878), was dismantled in 1879 by the Établissement Central de l'Aérostation Militaire , a research and training institute for aerostats of the French army, and rebuilt as Hangar Y at Meudon .
The hall from 1889, a joint project by the architect Charles Louis Ferdinand Dutert (1845–1906) and the engineer Victor Contamin (1840–1893), was dismantled in 1910. The location in front of the military school in the south of the field of Mars , which served as an exhibition area, was chosen. At the same time the Eiffel Tower was built on the banks of the Seine at the opposite end of the Field of Mars .
The hall from 1889
description
The hall had a rectangular floor plan of 422.49 m × 114.38 m and was divided into a broad nave and two narrow aisles. Its mighty supports resting on forty stone pedestals made an extraordinary impression of its size. The belt arches rose freely floating without intermediate supports to the 46.67 m high vault apex. The "Galerie des Machines" thus exceeded all imaginable dimensions of a column- free spanned space (total area of the three naves 47,324.9 m²).
In contrast, for example, to Labroustes Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève (1843) or the Paris Ostbahnhof (1849), whose glazed iron structures were both still encased with conventional stone walls, the lattice girders (riveted, crossed profile bars) were not only visible in the interior, but dominated also the facades, on which, apart from a slight decoration of the main entrance on one of the gable sides, no decoration was made.
Since the function of a world exhibition pavilion required quick and uncomplicated assembly and dismantling, all individual parts were completely prefabricated. The steel girders and the other iron components were manufactured by the Compagnie de Fives in Lille and the Societé des anciens établissements Cail near Paris.
After the Crystal Palace (1851, London) by Joseph Paxton , the Palais de l'Industrie (1855, Paris) by Viel, and the two previously built machine halls (1867 and 1878, Paris) - the first was a work by Gustave Eiffel and Krantz, the second by Henri de Dion - for the time being the final link in the chain of one-room buildings. It remained the greatest in the true "race for progress" in which Paris tried to outdo London with ever more spectacular works. The span, which had increased from 22 meters (Crystal Palace) to 48 meters (Palais de l'Industrie), reached 115 meters in the Galerie des Machines in 1889.
Inside, a roller bridge allowed visitors to be driven from one end of the gallery to the other and to get a comprehensive overview of all the machines, most of which were in operation. On some days the taxiway bridge carried 100,000 visitors.
cancellation
In 1907, the Paris City Council decided to demolish the hall. The reason was the intended redesign of the Field of Mars. The building impaired or blocked lines of sight and access to the site. The proposal to leave the hall to the state for the purpose of transferring it to the military training area of Issy-les-Moulineaux failed because of the required cost sharing of 2 million francs . The counter-proposal to donate the hall and its 47,000 square meters of building land to the state was rejected.
On February 6, 1909, a company was commissioned to demolish the Galerie des Machines; all material should be removed within a year. The first work started on April 17th and dragged on for about a year.
The Vélodrome d'Hiver
From 1902 to 1909 the Vélodrome d'Hiver was located in the hall . Henri Desgrange, editor of L'Auto magazine and later founder of the Tour de France , had the 333-meter-long track built. The Vélodrome d'Hiver (winter railway) itself only took up a third of the huge hall.
Judgment by contemporaries
The Galerie des Machines was constructively and aesthetically perfect and aroused just as much enthusiasm as the Crystal Palace at the time. Even if most of the contemporaries probably only emphasized the constructive performance, the practicality, the size, etc., the professional world also considered it to be beautiful and elegant:
"The 'Galerie des Machines' with its fantastic span of 115 meters [...], its bold ambition, its magnificent proportions [...] is just as beautiful, pure, just as original, just as high-ranking work of art as a Greek temple or a cathedral"
"[A] branches made of iron, just as elegant as the stone ribs that rise from the pillars of a Gothic cathedral"
Web links
literature
- Eugène Hénard: World Exhibition 1889. The Palace of Machines . Transl., Ed. and commented by Chup Friemert and Susanne Weiß, Textem, Hamburg 2009, ISBN 978-3-938801-83-3
- Michel Ragon : Histoire mondiale de l'architecture et de l'urbanisme modern. Volume 1: Idéologies et Pionniers. 1800-1910. Nouvelle édition, mise à jour et augmentée. Casterman, Tournai 1986, ISBN 2-203-23511-X .
- Claude Mignot: L'architecture au XIXe siècle. Edition du Moniteur u. a., Paris 1983, ISBN 2-281-15079-8 .
swell
- ↑ Michel Ragon, p. 225
- ^ Rejet d'un projet de cession à l'Etat de la Galerie des Machines. Bulletin municipal officiel de la Ville de Paris, November 30, 1907, pp. 4571–4584 , accessed on February 10, 2020 (French).
- ^ Journal d'Agriculture Pratique, 1909, p. 162
- ^ L'Intransigeant, April 18, 1909
- ↑ quoted by Michel Ragon, p. 226
- ^ Eugène Hénard: Exposition universelle de 1889. Le palais des Machines. Notice sur l'édifice et sur la marche des travaux . Paris. 1891. Quoted by Michel Ragon, p. 227
Coordinates: 48 ° 51 ′ 11.9 " N , 2 ° 18 ′ 7.9" E