Musée d'Orsay

The station was made of strong metal and lots of glass.

The outside was covered in pretty stone, to look like a palace. Inside, there were ramps and lifts for bags, elevators for people and train tracks under the ground.

The station's frame is made of metal, 12,000 tons of it. The neighborhood was elegant, with palaces nearby, and the station had to fit in. Laloux hid the metal frame behind a fancy stone front. Inside, it was very modern for 1900: it had ramps and lifts for luggage, elevators for travelers, electric trains and 16 tracks below street level.

The main hall is huge: 138 meters long, 40 meters wide and 32 meters high. To turn it into a museum, architects kept the great hall as the main path through the galleries, and made the old glass entrance canopy the museum's main entrance.

Laloux's commission was to fit a railway terminus into an elegant district beside the Louvre and the Legion of Honor. His solution hid the station's metal structure, 12,000 tons of it, behind a stone facade in an eclectic style, with 35,000 square meters of glass roofs and walls. Inside, the program was modern: inclined ramps and goods lifts for baggage, passenger elevators, sixteen tracks below ground and electric traction. The great hall, 138 m long, 40 m wide and 32 m high, was fronted along the river by a vestibule and an open porch.

In 1979 the ACT-Architecture group (Bardon, Colboc and Philippon) won the conversion from six proposals. They kept Laloux's architecture while reinterpreting it: the nave became the main axis of the visit and the glass canopy the main entrance, with galleries on three levels. Gae Aulenti's team designed the interior, unifying very different spaces with stone floors and walls and mixing daylight with adjustable artificial light.

Today, millions of people visit the museum.

In 2026, it turned 40 years old. Workers are fixing the square in front and the big glass roof over the door. The museum stays open while they work.

In 2026 the museum celebrated its 40th birthday. Since 1986 it has held 240 exhibitions and added almost 55,000 works to its collections.

The same year, it started a big repair project that will take about two and a half years. Workers are making the square in front of the museum waterproof again, and restoring the old glass canopy over the entrance so it wastes less energy. The museum stays open the whole time, with a new entrance and exit.

For its 40th anniversary in 2026 the museum reported 240 exhibitions, nearly 55,000 acquisitions and more than 140 million visitors since 1986. That year it launched a two-and-a-half-year project, led by Marie-Suzanne de Ponthaud, chief architect of historic monuments, to redo the leaking waterproofing of the forecourt (above an RER train station), improve the energy performance of the listed glass canopy, restore its riveted structure to its original color and separate the entrance from the exit.

The museum says the aim is not more visitors but better access for the 3.7 million it already receives each year. The project keeps both layers of the building's history: the 1900 station and the 1980s museum design.