Palace of the King of Rome

The hill of Chaillot, which now sits beneath the modern Palais de Chaillot in the sixteenth arrondissement, once held the site of an immense, unrealized ambition. In eighteen eleven, Napoleon Bonaparte commissioned architects Charles Percier and Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine to design a grand imperial residence here for his newborn son, the King of Rome. It was intended to be a vast structure that would rival the scale of Versailles and anchor a new administrative and military city, with a park sweeping across much of the surrounding landscape.