CENTQUATRE-PARIS (entrée administrative)

The building you are approaching is known as the Centquatre, or simply the one hundred and four, taking its name from its address at one hundred and four rue d Aubervilliers. While today it serves as a bustling, airy hub for contemporary art and performance, this massive structure was inaugurated in eighteen seventy-four as the municipal funeral service for the city of Paris. For over a century, this facility operated as a factory of mourning, where up to fourteen hundred workers manufactured thousands of coffins and organized as many as one hundred and fifty funeral processions every single day. The basement once held twenty-eight stables for the horses that pulled funeral carriages, alongside storage for massive water tanks and thousands of caskets. It remained a site dedicated exclusively to the logistics of death until it closed in nineteen ninety-eight, eventually finding its new life as a public cultural center in two thousand eight.