The Halle Freyssinet, renamed Station F, is a remarkable prestressed reinforced-concrete building built between 1927 and 1929 by the engineer Eugène Freyssinet. An innovative concrete-placing technique made it possible to give this hall a load-bearing structure of exceptional lightness, which earned it its listing on the Inventory of Historic Monuments since 2012.
Originally connected to the Gare d’Austerlitz rail network and intended to house train-to-truck transshipment operations, this giant start-up accelerator is located in the heart of the urban renewal sector of the ZAC Paris Rive Gauche, below the Bibliothèque François Mitterrand, in the 13th arrondissement of Paris.
310 metres long and 58 metres wide, Station F is made up of three parallel naves made of thin prestressed-concrete vaults, whose thickness can taper to less than 5 cm at the ridge. The presence of suspended canopies projecting from the building allows the extreme structural slenderness of the whole by acting as counterweights, thus allowing the concrete skeleton to be optimised and reduced to the sole expression of the forces passing through it.
