This curious building is located on Avenue Daumesnil in Paris's 12th arrondissement, near the Gare de Lyon. It is viewed from the Promenade Plantée, a linear park that converts an 19th-century elevated railway bed into a modern greenway. Although the building's showy façade evokes a Hollywood set piece à la Busby Berkeley, it is actually a police headquarters.

The building's atlantes figures are replicas of "The Dying Slave," a statue by Michelangelo, whose original is in the city's Louvre Museum.