It is “the most improbable scenario at the start” which is to take place on Thursday August 31 in Toulouse: the famous monument to the dead of the Pink City, which has never moved from its strategic crossroads since its erection in 1928, will rotate 90° then travel for about thirty meters. Wrapped in an “exoskeleton” of wood and steel, the building will be lifted in one piece thanks to hydraulic cylinders and then slide to its temporary retirement, in the shade of the plane trees, thanks to a rolling platform. .
This spectacular operation, for which technical preparations began a year ago, should make it possible to build a metro station for the future line C. The deepest of the project, at 45 meters, dug just below the “arc de triomphe” Toulouse to spare the even more venerable plane trees of the François-Verdier alleys. But digging a huge hole under a monument weighing more than 1,000 tons turned out to be risky from the start.
Disassembly not possible
“Honestly, two and a half years ago I thought that it would be the second hypothesis that would be adopted, that of deconstructing it and then putting it back together stone by stone”, confides Jean-Michel Lattes, the president of Tisséo. Toulouse would then have played the limestone version of the dismantling of the famous Baltard pavilion No. 8 of Les Halles in Paris. In 1971, it was saved from destruction by disassembly and reassembly and has since lived its best life, full and cultural, in Nogent-sur-Marne. But hell. After a feasibility analysis, it turned out that in the sculpted heights of the “monument to the glory of the combatants” – its real name – the builders had used a mixture of limestone and concrete. Impossible to disassemble without breaking. And, naturally, the architect of the buildings of France put his veto. Results of the races, it was the hypothesis that seemed the most far-fetched, that of a move like clockwork, which finally succeeded.
The Temple of Abu Simbel… with a bit of exaggeration
The “translation”, in one piece, of such an imposing building is probably “a first in France”. But not in the world. With modesty, Jean-Michel Lattes finds it “very exaggerated” to compare the Toulouse operation to the relocation of the Abu Simbel temple in Egypt. In the 1960s, this tourist jewel, built during the reign of Ramses II, found itself threatened with submersion by the construction of the Aswan dam. But its move to the shelter, on the side of an artificial hill, was done by dismantling. From 1964 to 1968, the temple was cut into 1,035 pieces weighing 20 to 30 tons each. Fifty countries and 800 workers participated in the feat, for 36 million dollars at the time. That the inhabitants of Toulouse are reassured, for the monument to the dead we are at 7 million euros.
A German chapel exiled 12 kilometers away
No, by tapping on the Internet when giving the green light, Jean-Michel latte was especially reassured by looking at Germany. In particular, he came across the not so old example of the small chapel in Heuersdorf, a municipality in the south of Leipzig. The building weighing 660 tons, less than the Toulouse monument, and 20 meters high against 15 in the Pink City, had to give way to the extension of a mining site. In October 2007, the modest church was lifted in its entirety and placed on rolling platforms. It took about twenty days to cover 12 km and be “rested”. According to AFP, this move cost 3 million euros.
A Shanghai Buddhist temple and a Swiss train station
Another example, more recent but more remote. In September 2017, the busy but too small Jade Buddha Temple in Shanghai, weighing 2,000 tons, also traveled 30 meters in the space of two weeks. It was a question of adding an esplanade to it to better manage crowd movements. But the temple traveled on specially cast concrete rails, not on a rolling platform. In 2013, the Swiss station of Chêne-Bourg, which the inhabitants of this modest town wanted to save despite the construction of a new line, “slid” by about thirty meters, also on rails. Its weight was 700 tons.
It is also thanks to popular mobilization that in 1999, the Schubert Theater in Minneapolis, in the United States – now called Goodale Theater – was not demolished at the same time as the neighborhood that housed it, plagued by crime. He was moved on a wheeled cart a few blocks away.
Reassuring examples while waiting for the Toulouse fight commotion. And, no matter what, it will go down in history. Because, it is completely new, the monument will make the trip in the opposite direction, probably in 2028, to be rested in the same place, “to the nearest centimeter”.