The French pavilion at the Universal Exhibition in Dubai should have been reinstalled from the National Center for Space Studies (Cnes) in Toulouse. Badly dismantled, the building cannot be rebuilt. It was sold off for a pittance to scrap dealers.
Le Canard chainé revealed in its June 12 edition that the French pavilion at the 2020 Universal Exhibition in Dubai, which was to be reconstructed identically on the CNES site in Toulouse, was never reassembled. Worse still, the “kit” was sold off to scrap dealers. On June 12, 2024, 870 tonnes of various metals were sold for 269,700 euros. Very far from the purchase price: 3.7 million euros including 800,000 euros just for transport. Cnes did not find a buyer for the rest. This involves 47 tonnes of alucobond (composite material) and aluminum panels.
For three years, the building’s spare parts had been strewn in the weeds in front of the company restaurant. For the image of an internationally recognized institution, we do better. Internally, the affair has fueled hallway conversations for years, even more so since the satirical newspaper’s revelations. An employee testifies: “All services are scandalized by the situation. However, management is not held responsible. The decision to repatriate the building to Toulouse comes from the highest levels of the State. The idea that they wanted to sell to the general public was that France is at the forefront in terms of reuse and recycling. What a waste of public money!
The “palmiped” charges the Cofrex
This pavilion should have accommodated certain CNES departments. It was also to serve as a “showcase of CNES and its activity”, a point of passage for certain foreign delegations… The board of directors chose the path of wisdom. Given the looming costs of the reconstruction, he preferred to stop the project. The conditions of dismantling and transporting the building from Dubai led to the delivered materials arriving damaged. “We were able to note that the structural beams had been incorrectly cut. This significantly increased the cost of the reconstruction project,” specifies CNES management.
Le Canard chainé attributes responsibility for this failure to the French Exhibition Company (Cofrex), founded in 2018 to manage France’s participation in international exhibitions. To reduce costs, Cofrex decided to withdraw the dismantling contract from the company Besix, which had built the pavilion in close collaboration with Jean-Luc Pérez, the architect. This decision was criticized by the designer himself, the dismantling of such a structure requiring a very specific methodology which the new service providers did not respect.
(1) The cost of constructing the pavilion is estimated at 36 million euros