The Halle aux blés (Wheats Exchange or Grains Exchange) was a circular building in central Paris used by grain traders built in 1763–1767, with an open-air interior court that was capped by a wooden dome in 1783, then by an iron dome in 1811.

[3] Construction of the hall began in 1763 following a design by Nicolas Le Camus de Mézières (1721–89), who supervised the work.

[4] It was too small to serve the needs of the two million inhabitants of Paris and had become a sort of bourse, or exchange for titles to grain from Beauce, Brie and Picardy, and flour from the mills of Seine-et-Marne and Seine-et-Oise.

[8] In 1782 François-Joseph Bélanger (1744–1818) proposed to add an iron cupola to cover the courtyard, but his plan was rejected.

Instead, from 1782 to 1783 a laminated wood dome was built to a design by Jacques-Guillaume Legrand (1753–1807) and Jacques Molinos (1743–1831) based on the principles defined by Philibert de l'Orme (c. 1514–1570).

[4] The interior of the rotunda was decorated with medallion portraits of Louis XVI, police lieutenant Jean-Charles-Pierre Lenoir (1732–1807) and Philibert Delorme, inventor of the technique used to make the dome.

[9] The Minister of the Interior ran a competition for a replacement dome, and Bélanger resubmitted his design from 1782.

[9] In 1806 Jean-Baptiste Launay presented a model for a cast-iron dome for the market to the Exposition des produits de l'industrie française.

The engineer François Brunet assisted Bélanger in the calculations and design of the dome, which had a diameter of more than 39 metres (128 ft).

[11] Victor Hugo mocked the dome on his 1831 novel Notre-Dame de Paris, calling it an English jockey-cap on a large scale.

[9] When Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) visited Paris he was highly impressed by the wooden dome, which he called the "most superb thing on earth".