Rapid progress has been made in the development of advanced analytical methods for fire engineering design in the last few years. As part of this tendency, the fire parts of Eurocodes provide the possibility to calculate the fire behaviour of structures.For the Paris Museum Centre Georges Pompidou , columns located outside the building are currently protected aginst fire by the circulation of water inside them. In order to decrease the cost of maintenance it is planned to use intumescent paint.The fire behaviour of steel structural elements located outside a building cannot be assessed like those located inside, since they are less heated and generally not fully engulfed in hot gases. The fire parts of Eurocode 1 -- Actions (Eurocode 1) and 3 -- Steel Structures (Eurocode 3) allow the use of a specific calculation method based on the concept of a natural fire.However these Eurocode-fire parts are neither able to take into account the effect of the section factor of the steel sections (steady state heat transfer conditions) nor to consider any fire protection material applied on the profile.For the heavy sections of Centre Georges Pompidou's columns, protected by intumescent paint, a natural fire test was performed to obtain more accurate knowledge of the temperature field in the steel. Furthermore numerical simulations were made to allow a better assessment of the necessary thickness of paint, by improving the Eurocode method.In order to study the mechanical behaviour under fire of these insulated columns, a part of the building was analysed. The mechanical analysis of the steel structure is based on the finite element method in which the thermal gradient in the element sections is taken into account (Kaneko, 1990). Concerning the height of the column affected by the fire, different scenarios were studied. In this paper the most severe case is presented.