Embassy of Australia, Paris
The Australian Embassy in Paris is located 400 metres southwest of the Eiffel Tower, on Rue Jean Rey in the 15th arrondissement of Paris, near the Bir-Hakeim bridge on the Seine. The embassy is situated on a triangular shaped block, and comprises a pair of nine-storey buildings. The Chancellery Building houses Australia's missions to France, to UNESCO and to the OECD, and the apartment of the ambassador to France; the other building contains 34 staff apartments, all with views of the Seine and the Eiffel Tower.
The embassy, and several pieces of its original furniture, were designed in a modernist style by Australian architect Harry Seidler, with Marcel Breuer and Pier Luigi Nervi as consulting designers. Like many of Seidler's other works, the Embassy was built from precast modularised concrete, with a quartz and granite faced exterior and prestressed precast floors. Its two buildings are curved to form two quarter circles, the two arcs of an "S"-shaped complex, with the radii of the circles lined up to match the axes of the Eiffel Tower and the Champ de Mars.
The land for the embassy, that was a part of the disused railway depot near the old station of the Champ de Mars, was purchased by the McMahon government of Australia in 1972. Construction started on the Embassy in 1975, and it was completed in 1977.
