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The station
It was built as a railway station for the 1900 fair
The Gare d'Orsay was built from 1898 to 1900 on the site of the Palais d'Orsay, for the Chemin de Fer de Paris à Orléans. It was finished in time for the 1900 Exposition Universelle, to the design of three architects: Lucien Magne, Émile Bénard and Victor Laloux.
The reprieve
Permission to demolish it was granted in 1970
In 1970 permission was granted to demolish the station, but Jacques Duhamel, Minister for Cultural Affairs, ruled against plans to build a new hotel in its place. The station was put on the supplementary list of Historic Monuments and finally listed in 1978.
The plan
A museum planned to sit between two others
The idea was to build a museum that would bridge the gap between the Louvre and the National Museum of Modern Art at the Georges Pompidou Centre. A team of three young architects won the contract in 1978, and Gae Aulenti was chosen in 1981 to design the interior.
The opening
Six months to hang about 2,000 paintings
In July 1986 the museum was ready to receive its exhibits, and it took six months to install about 2,000 paintings and 600 sculptures. President François Mitterrand opened it in December 1986. Under a glass floor inside is a 1:100 model of the Paris Opera and the area around it.
1:100scale of the model of the Paris Opera under the glass floor
Day 3, morning
Next is Musée Rodin.
More stories from this trip idea
The words are a retelling of the Wikipedia article Musée d'Orsay, and are shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. They are checked against those articles, and a fact that is not in them is left out.