The Palais de Chaillot began life as a convent before the French Revolution, then became the rather peculiar Trocadéro Palace in 1878. That oddly Moorish-Byzantine structure was torn down in 1935 to make way for the current building, designed for the 1937 World's Fair by 22 sculptors, 58 painters and two ironworkers labouring over its Art Deco details.

The timing proved darkly significant. At that same fair, the pavilions of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia faced each other across the gardens in an architectural stare-down. Three years later, Hitler posed on this very terrace with the Eiffel Tower behind him. The photograph became one of the war's defining images. In 1948, Eleanor Roosevelt drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in these halls.

VoiceMap's self-guided audio tours trace the site's transformation from aristocratic hunting grounds to a symbol of human rights, revealing how the first manned balloon flight launched from nearby fields in 1783.