I visit for the first time in March 2021, just days after the official start of the works. Crossing a dark Paris streets cold, shutters down, traffic sluggish I arrive along the Seine and walk towards the meeting point on avenue Eisenhower, and it s much longer than I imagined, I now realise I m going to be late, I huff and puff, cursing myself, I should have remembered these considerable dimensions, I know this place, I ve come here often, and as I hurry to the impressive colonnade, I imagine that one of the ways to experience a building, before even seeing it or going inside, is maybe to walk round it, to grasp its circumference I ll later find out that the Grand Palais's is a kilometre long. But what would I be walking round, were I to walk round the Grand Palais? The moment I get to the checks, I realise that this building, unlike the transparency of its glass roof, has a certain opacity. In fact, I m not quite sure what those two words, grand palais , refer to exactly, if it s just the huge Nave and its exhibition galleries, or if they also cover the other palace that backs onto it and that appears on my map, the Palais d Antin, which since 1937 has housed the Palais de la Découverte, the one I m entering through today, Door B.

Work on the Grand Palais has begun. This is the restoration of an extraordinary building, at once a historical monument, a national palace and Paris icon, the triple embodiment of an ideal of universality, French spirit and the Parisian life whose shimmer could be seen all the way from Le Havre, where I grew up. In my child s mind, Paris was about the Champs-Élysées and a few symbols dotted usefully along the banks of the Seine: Notre-Dame cathedral, the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower/Trocadéro duo, and the Grand Palais, which for me was long condensed into that fabulous glass roof, so tall that it

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