Musee d'Orsay

The Musee d'Orsay occupies a former railway station, the Gare d'Orsay, built on the left bank of the Seine in Paris to a design led by the architect Victor Laloux and completed in 1900 in time to serve visitors arriving for that year's World's Fair. Its vast steel-framed train shed was concealed behind an elaborate Beaux-Arts stone facade so that the station would not clash visually with the grand architecture of the surrounding neighborhood, a compromise typical of the era's uneasy relationship between industrial engineering and civic monumentality. The station fell out of use for long-distance rail traffic by the 1930s as its platforms proved too short for modern trains, and after decades of mixed uses the building faced demolition before being saved and converted into a museum. The conversion, completed in 1986 under the direction of the Italian architect Gae Aulenti, inserted new gallery floors and structures within the original iron and glass shed while preserving its great barrel-vaulted hall, and the museum now holds one of the world's leading collections of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting.