Atelier des Lumières

This guide to the Atelier des Lumières in Paris starts in 1835, when the Plichon family began pouring iron in this hall for the French navy and railways, and follows four generations of that business through boom and eventual collapse in the crash of 1929. It traces the building's decades of silence afterward, and the moment in 2013 when a cultural foundation looked at the empty shell and its twelve-metre walls and saw something else entirely. Watch for the original iron beams still visible above your head as you move through the space — they once carried a crane built to lift ten-tonne iron castings.