An Extravagant
Orangery

Every five years, a global group organizes a European exhibition presenting its European network with all the new technologies developed by the Group for the next five years.

The lunch venue must be close to the event, so the guests can dedicate enough time to visiting the exhibition. Unfortunately, it is impossible to find enough restaurants answering the client’s time constraints.

Finding a way to answer this space constraint and enabling 6000 guests per day to have lunch close to the exhibition venue: Grande Halle de La Villette.

Building a replica of the exhibition’s main building.

A steel and glass orangery of 2000 square meters was custom-built and set up in order to address this challenge. This ephemeral structure could welcome 6000 people per day for lunch, during 3 days.

Design, production, construction, installation… we needed 18 months to obtain the licenses and permits, select and accompany the suppliers who were likely to help us meet this challenge, but the result was incredible…

A clever system set up with a famous Parisian caterer allowed us to serve the guests very rapidly (2000 people per hour), which perfectly matched the client’s time and space constraints.

The architecture of the ephemeral structure was perfectly integrated to the main building to which it was connected.