The Fountain of Trocadero or Warsaw Fountain is located in the Trocadero Garden, below the Palais de Chaillot, in the 16th arrondissement of Paris.
The Trocadero Fountain forms an island bounded to the southwest by Avenue Albert-Ier-de-Monaco, to the west by Avenue Hussein-Ier-de-Jordan and to the northeast by Avenue Gustave-V-de-Suède.
History : before 1937, the original fountain
There was already a "Palais du Trocadero" built for the 1878 Paris World Fair. There was also a fountain in the form of a waterfall that had been built by Gabriel Davioud for the same exhibition.
The fountain was surrounded by four bronze sculptures, Le Cheval à la herse by Pierre Louis Rouillard, Le Jeune éléphant pris au piège by Emmanuel Frémiet, Le Rhinocéros by Henri-Alfred Jacquemart and Le Bœuf by Auguste Cain, the first three of which are now in Paris in front of the Musée d'Orsay, the last one in the town of Nîmes.
The Palais du Trocadero and its fountain were destroyed in 1935 to make way for the present buildings.
Bronze mascarons of Auguste Rodin were integrated there. Seven of them were recovered and reinstalled in the Parc de Sceaux; others were installed on the retaining wall of the terrace of the Auteuil greenhouse garden and the plaster models of two of them are kept in the Musée des arts décoratifs in Paris.
The Fountain of Trocadero of 1937
The fountain was built for the specialized exhibition of 1937. It was a complete restructuring of the area, replacing the old Trocadero Palace with the present-day Palais de Chaillot and rearranging the Trocadero Garden.
The architects at work were Roger-Henri Expert, Paul Maître and Adolphe Thiers, as well as the sculptors Daniel-Joseph Bacqué and Léon-Ernest Drivier.
The description of the time indicates that "it is the largest fountain in Paris which includes twenty oblique cannons, divided into four groups of five, pointed towards the Eiffel Tower and with a range of fifty meters, to which are added, in strictly aquatic terms, fifty-six sprays of water of four meters and twelve columns of seven meters. The whole requires a power to the pumps of thousand horses. During the 1937 exhibition, 530 electric spotlights were installed in and around the fountain to create a night show."
In the winter, when the fountain is frozen, it is possible to ice skate and slide on the surface.
During the summer of 2021, the Trocadero gardens are being redeveloped in an ephemeral way to host a fanzone to follow the Tokyo Olympic Games. For this occasion, the fountain is transformed into a stadium.
The today Fountain of Trocadero
The current Trocadero Fountain has remained virtually unchanged. It has the shape of a rectangular basin, topped by a series of small symmetrical basins operating in a closed circuit. Twenty oblique water cannons still have a range of 50 meters, 56 sheaves with a range of 7 meters (instead of 4 m) and 12 water columns of 7 meters propel. The flow rate of the whole is 5,700 liters of water per second.
Two sculptures frame the fountain on the Seine side, in the lower part: La Joie de vivre by Léon-Ernest Drivier and La Jeunesse by Pierre-Marie Poisson. A sculpture representing horses and a dog, by Georges Guyot, and another, by Paul Jouve, representing a bull and a deer, decorate the basins while two statues by Pierre Traverse (The Man) and Daniel Bacqué (The Woman) overhang the building.
The Fountain of Trocadero integrates a night lighting system.
Add a review