The clocks of the Orsay Museum in Paris.
Long before it became one of the world’s great museums, the Musée d’Orsay was the Gare d’Orsay, one of the most modern railway stations in Europe.
The Orsay railway station, beside the river Seine, was built for the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris to service travellers to and from southwest France. The architect, Victor Laloux, faced an unusual challenge. The station occupied one of the most elegant sites in Paris, opposite the Tuileries Gardens and close to the Louvre art gallery. An industrial railway station simply would not do, so he disguised modern engineering behind magnificent Beaux-Arts architecture.
Today the trains have gone. The platforms have become museum galleries and the locomotives have given way to sculptures. Yet the two enormous clocks remain exactly where they have always been, still keeping time in the great hall.
The great gold-gilded clock inside the museum is perhaps the most theatrical. Its elaborate Belle Époque decoration was designed to impress. It combines engineering with ornament, reflecting an age that believed beauty and technology could exist together.
There is another enormous glass clock with black Roman numerals, overlooking the Seine with a view of the Louvre, the Tuileries, and rooftops.
The Musée d’Orsay did not erase its history when it became a museum in 1986. Instead, it chose to celebrate it. The station’s great iron-and-glass hall, its monumental clocks and much of Victor Laloux’s architecture were carefully preserved, allowing visitors to experience both the railway station of 1900 and the museum of today at the same time.
