Hôtel de Massa

The Hôtel de Massa is a rare survivor of eighteenth-century Parisian architecture that literally pulled up its roots to stay alive. Built originally on the Champs-Élysées, the mansion was threatened with demolition in the nineteen twenties to make way for a large commercial shopping complex. Rather than letting the neoclassical structure disappear, developers numbered each of its two thousand four hundred and eighty stones and moved the entire building piece by piece to its current location beside the gardens of the Paris Observatory.