Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [172]
At first, architects balked at the new engineering techniques, such as using iron beams or vaults to create the broad spans needed to construct the ticket halls and train sheds. As Anthony Sutcliffe notes in Paris: An Architectural History, an entirely new kind of structure was needed in nineteenth-century Paris—one that would accommodate “large-scale manufacturing, steam railways and high-volume commerce. These buildings started to appear in and around Paris in about 1840.”
Iron and glass were becoming less expensive, but architects feared that aesthetic appeal might suffer. Respected names such as Labrouste, who designed the Sainte-Geneviève Library in 1842, made efforts to build with the new materials. In the 1850s, the Les Halles food market area (designed by eminent architect Baltard) pleased the emperor with its extensive system of roofs and clerestories. Still, the first two railway stations—Gare d’Orléans (1840), now Gare d’Austerlitz, and Gare du Nord (1846)—used modest railway architects. The Gare du Nord was originally an arcaded classical design “reflecting the horizontality of the trains and looking like orangeries or market buildings in the pre-Baltard style,” notes Sutcliffe. But as the more fashionable architects showed that the new materials could be applied to fine architecture, the stations began to look like showplaces.
GARE DU NORD
After the Gare du Nord’s modest beginning as a railway-company design in a then remote area of the city, railway chairman Baron James de Rothschild took another look at the neoclassical structures that dotted the city—notably Jakob Ignaz Hittorff’s nearby church of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul. Rothschild commissioned the German-born architect to give the Gare du Nord a facelift in 1859. Hittorff created a neoclassical frontage with giant Ionic pilasters that define the central pavilion; the gables on the end pavilions reflect the wide pitched roof of the train shed. Huge statues stand on the façade, so that the structure “combined a practical design for a railway station and the classical features of a self-conscious Parisian public monument.”
The interior is considered cathedral-like in its vastness, the original green columns supporting the roof of the train shed. Hittorff complained about a lack of “monumental street access,” though Haussmann supplied two short approach streets. Access has further improved with the recent addition of a service road and drop-off area at the front entrance. From the upper level, you can see the bullet-shaped TGV trains to northern towns and the Thalys line to Belgium, Holland, and Germany waiting to speed away.
The Gare du Nord is also the starting point for Eurostar, the Channel Tunnel (Chunnel) line, and the upper level has been transformed into a plush service-area-cum-waiting lounge. To inaugurate the Euro Tunnel in May 1994, François Mitterrand commissioned a sculpture. Europa Operanda’s futuristic bronze figures of an adult and child dominate the parapet overlooking the Grandes Lignes.
GARE DE L’EST
Built three years after the original Gare du Nord, this station inspired all the others. As Sutcliffe notes, the stations “offered the chance to create completely new spaces and circulation systems, using iron and glass in a more creative way than was normally possible in Parisian architecture.” Stations also had “monumental potential at the head of the approach streets.” Architect F. A. Duquesney emphasized the semicircular vault of the train shed, “which sprang above an arcaded frontage and was flanked by two three-story pavilions, topped by a balustrade, in the formal style of railway offices of the day.