France's late 19th-century Universal Expositions made Paris an increasingly important centre of technology, trade, and tourism. Its most famous were the 1889 Exposition Universelle to which Paris owes its "temporary" display of architectural engineering progress, the Eiffel Tower, a structure that remained the world's tallest building until 1930; the 1900 Universal Exposition saw the opening of the first Paris Métro line.

Joseph-Antoine Bouvard was a French architect. He trained with Hugues Quenin in Vienna, Austria, and in 1864 he enrolled in the École nationale supérieure de beaux arts in Paris, where he studied under Simon-Claude Constant-Dufeux. Among his realized projects are the Caserme de la Garde républicaine (1882-1883) and the Bourse du Travail in Paris (1892), and the railway stations of Saint-Étienne-Châteaucreux (1882-1884) and Marseilles-Saint-Charles (1893-1896). He was involved in many International Expositions: he designed the Pavilion of the City of Paris for the Exposition of 1878, and the central dome of Galerie des machines at the Exposition of 1899 in Paris. He had a leading role in the organization of the 1900 Paris Exposition, and designed the beautiful neoclassical Pavilion of the city of Paris for the Exposition of 1911 in Turin.