Word: gare
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...railroad station with a built-in hotel, serving as the terminus of lines from southwestern France. Its architect, Victor Laloux (1850-1937), did not approach the genius of men like Charles Garnier, who created the Paris Opera, and Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, France's supreme engineer. But he gave the Gare d'Orsay all he had, and that, backed by the decorative and engineering resources of fin de siecle Paris, was quite a lot: a vast semicircular barrel vault of iron and glass, stretching 150 yards from end to end, with elliptical-domed side vaults along the Quai Anatole France facing...
...Gare d'Orsay was a secular cathedral, dedicated to the rites of travel, but its glories lasted only 40 years. By 1939 changes in railroad technology had downgraded it to a commuter station. In 1969 the last train left, and the place was abandoned: a rusting abode of cats and pigeons, whose damp silence was occasionally broken by film units; Orson Welles and Bernardo Bertolucci are among the directors who have sought evocative locations in its Piranesian gloom. Meanwhile developers covetously eyed it, dreaming of the slow-motion arc of the wrecker's ball. In 1971 the French government, under...
...them, preferably in Paris, as a proof of their passage. But no President de la Republique since World War II showed a more recklessly phara- onic commitment to changing the face of Paris than Pompidou. By a curious irony, the political consequences of this urge are what saved the Gare d'Orsay. Pompidou had ordered the razing and redevelopment of the vast central food market known as Les Halles -- Zola's "belly of Paris." The market, which had formed a bolus of stalled, honking traffic, was shifted to Rungis, near Orly Airport. In its place Paris received, among other things...
...destruction of Les Halles rallied the preservationists. The inadequacies of Beaubourg fed a mood of doubt about "radical" museum techniques. By the early '70s it was clear to the men of the Elysee that razing the Gare d'Orsay would be a major vote-losing blunder. The Gare d'Orsay stayed, Pompidou died, and Valery Giscard d'Estaing, the new President, inherited the problem...
...build, you must have land. Here, this old building was my new land. There are two ways to look at an old building: historically, as a monument or structure, and geographically. My way is geographic." No internal structure could abolish or convincingly mask the "geographic" form of the Gare d'Orsay. Instead, Aulenti set out to work with it as a given fact, making a new building that encourages constant reference to the old while scrupulously reflecting in its layout the narrative lines of the collection...