The Central Hall, Escalators and Rotating Cupolas
Adrien Fainsilber (1932 to 2023) · 1986
Once through the ticket barriers you stand in a hall the height of a cathedral, criss-crossed by blue steel trusses, with escalators rising in long diagonals through the void and, far above, two great round openings in the roof through which daylight falls in slanting beams. Banners and suspended objects hang in the space, and the noise of thousands of visitors echoes off the concrete. The hall is the spine of the building, and every route to the exhibitions, the planetarium and the children's areas starts from here.
The cupolas overhead are the building's most ingenious feature. Each is a glazed dome about seventeen metres across, mounted on a ring that rotates slowly to follow the sun, with mirrored louvres that reflect daylight down into the hall. Fainsilber wanted a science museum to be lit by the sky, and the cupolas are a working demonstration of solar tracking in the roof itself. Look up from the middle of the hall and you can sometimes catch the shadow of the louvres moving. The escalators, exposed like those at the Pompidou Centre, are meant to be part of the show, carrying visitors through the full height of the structure.
The concrete columns and beams around you are the original 1970s frame of the abattoir sale hall, left bare in places so that the history is visible. The trusses and the panoramic lifts were added in the 1980s and the whole interior was refreshed in later decades as galleries were rebuilt. Take a moment on the top escalator to look back down: from there the hall, the greenhouses and the crowds below make one of the great interior views of modern Paris.
Did You Know? The cupolas turn to follow the sun, so the pools of light on the hall floor move across the space during the day.
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