Dismantle and reassemble the Sources pavilion? A proven but expensive solution

Dismantling the Sources pavilion, brick by brick, then reassembling it about twenty meters further: the solution proposed by the Curie Institute to save the former Marie Curie work building in Paris raises a host of questions, to which the owner of the building and its architects will have to respond. “The Minister of Culture resolved a controversy that had been going on for months, and now the matter is in the hands of the Institute,” explains Rachida Dati’s entourage today.

According to the initial project, the two-story, hundred-square-meter building, where the double Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry and Physics worked, was to be destroyed to make way for a future five-story cancer research campus. . Faced with the emotion generated by the destruction permit granted by Paris City Hall in March 2023, the institute proposed an alternative. “We sought an honest and thorough solution” explains Thierry Philip, its president, to Le Parisien . In his eyes, moving the small building near the Pierre and Marie Curie museum is a “win-win” solution. It allows us to reconcile the future and the memory of Marie Curie and Claudius Régnaud, one of the first radiotherapists who founded the Institute. The dismantling and reassembly would represent 5 million euros in additional costs to the budget of 12 million and would cause a delay of a few months for the opening of the new center, scheduled for 2026.

It remains to delve into the modus operandi of the affair. Built in 1911, the pavilion was closed due to dilapidation and because it was considered contaminated by radioactivity points. It is not classified and its dismantling is not the responsibility of a chief architect of historic monuments. It will therefore be necessary to find a construction company to carry out the work, with the aim of decontaminating certain parts. The Sources pavilion is also made of bricks (apart from a cut stone pediment), a fragile material: it is therefore likely that bricks will have to be rebuilt once the mortar has been removed.

For the rest, nothing is impossible. Heritage buildings have already been moved in the past, such as the facade of the former Gare du Nord de Paris, today in Lille, or one of the twelve Baltard pavilions of the Halles de Paris, now in Nogent-sur-Marne . The Metropolitan of New York deploys, north of Manhattan, five medieval French cloisters, acquired and then donated to the museum by John Rockefeller, in the 1920s and 1930s. “In principle, we remove the stones or elements one by one, by noting, then we put them back together following the same diagram,” explains a heritage architect.

In Toulouse, a drastic solution was imagined for the city's war memorial, inaugurated in 1928. Weighing 950 tonnes, too fragile to be dismantled end by end, it was moved in its entirety this summer. A spectacular gesture, decided in advance of the underground work on the François-Verdier metro station, which will be located just below. Moved 35 meters, the building will return to its place in 2027.