Galerie Colbert

The Galerie Colbert stands out with a glass dome that rises over a rotunda, held together by a framework of iron. Built in eighteen twenty-six to compete with the nearby Galerie Vivienne, it served as a luxury shopping arcade. The original developer, Jean-Baptiste Francois Billard, hoped to attract wealthy crowds, but the venue struggled to keep businesses afloat for long. By the nineteen seventies, the building was declared unsafe and shuttered, eventually saved by the National Library of France for academic use.