"Is Paris’s Olympics Architecture Right-Sized for our Times? With its tight environmental targets, redevelopment of historic landmarks, and adaptable housing for athletes, Paris 2024 aims to make hosting the Olympics thrifty and useful to the city," Metropolis, July 24, 2024.
The renovation of Paris’s Grand Palais by Chatillon Architects turns the 1900 glass pavilion designed for that year’s World Expo into a show-stopping 21st century centerpiece for the Paris 2024 Olympics and Paralympics. Together with the Olympic and Paralympic Village, planned by Une Fabrique de la Ville, which extends across a new pedestrian bridge from the near-Paris northern suburb of Saint-Ouen-sur-Seine to Saint-Denis, it’s part of a Paris Olympics scope of work envisaged as feathery light in its ecological footprint and eminently heavy on public services for city dwellers.
The $4.74 billion Paris 2024 plan advertises itself as “building less, better, and usefully.” It relies on existing structures, easily disassembled temporary pavilions, and urban interventions with an integral ongoing benefit to the metropolitan region. By building in a limited way tied to pre-existing urban development plans, the Paris Olympics committee is trying to avoid the multibillion-dollar debt trap hosting the games has incurred on cities like Beijing ($52.7B), Sochi ($59.7B), and Tokyo ($35B). Costs have reportedly climbed to at least $9.66 billion as of April, but that figure still counts as thrifty compared to other recent games.
The overhauled building services of the $500 million Grand Palais project, for instance, radically updates a venue up-to-now mostly used for trade shows and fashion week events, and only in good seasonal weather. After the renovation, it’s becoming a year-round contemporary cultural center with planned exhibitions of Chiharu Shiota, Niki de Saint Phalle, Anthony Gourmley, Francis Alÿs, and Nan Goldin, along with trade shows, fashion events, and popular spectacles like tightrope walking. “We’re not making the restoration just to make the restauration of historical monuments,” says François Chatillon, a specialist in sensitive historic rehabilitation projects. “We are making the restoration for people to use it. Not only to make something beautiful but to increase capacity. Three thousand people came into the Palais before; tomorrow it will be 9,000 people.”
To add functionality to the Grand Palais, Chatillon Architects inserted a radiant-heated-and-cooled floor keeping the grandiose structure comfortable within five-to-seven feet above ground level. They discreetly hid the pipes, pumps, and wiring in a pink-pigmented concrete floor reminiscent of the earthy terrain that once accommodated equestrian transport. Interstitial glass walls between sections of the palace allow for simultaneous cultural-and-event programming while steadfastly maintaining openness and visibility. The exquisitely restored bronze-colored Art Nouveau staircase and new thermal windows express a devotion to the turn-of-the-19th-century designs of Henri Deglane, Albert Louvet, Albert Thomas, and Charles Girault with a contemporary frisson.
