Word: garnier
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There is actually some difference of opinion about whether Paris really needs an expensive new opera house. The grand old Palais Garnier, with all its gilt mirrors and chandeliers and its resident phantom, has delighted audiences for more than a century. But cultural-monument building is a beloved Parisian occupation, and after the success of President Georges Pompidou's imposing modern-art center, Mitterrand naturally began in 1981 to think about a new opera house. Being a Socialist, he talked glowingly of popular, modern opera, and the edifice was assigned to the gritty Bastille area...
Operaphiles may agree on little else, but on one subject they are unanimous: Charles Garnier's Paris Opera, conceived in a burst of Second Empire glory and opened in a blaze of Third Republic splendor, is the world's most opulent opera house. The Paris Opera (Vendome; 187 pages; $75), with text by Martine Kahane, curator of the Opera's library-museum, and musicologist Thierry Beauvert, succinctly recounts the history of the fabled hall, but the real tour d'horizon is provided by Jacques Moatti's photographs, which take the reader from the subterranean lake beneath the mammoth building, where...
...nearly 30 years. Then, in 1898, the Orleans railroad company bought the site and raised on it a railroad station with a built-in hotel, serving as the terminus of lines from southwestern France. Its architect, Victor Laloux (1850-1937), did not approach the genius of men like Charles Garnier, who created the Paris Opera, and Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, France's supreme engineer. But he gave the Gare d'Orsay all he had, and that, backed by the decorative and engineering resources of fin de siecle Paris, was quite a lot: a vast semicircular barrel vault of iron and glass...
Beaux-Arts design was various. Its major works run from the quiet classicism of Charles Percier's arcades along the Rue de Rivoli - one of the stateliest parade grounds in the world - to the exuberance of Garnier's Opera. But there was always a concern (surprising as it must sound after the years of propaganda) for functional clarity, and it shows in the superbly detailed drawings that make up the show at MOMA...
...film. The grand-scale, centralized package they had in mind was a challenging problem for an architect. How does one design a "monumental" building that visually responds to the immense emotional and conceptual range of the performing arts? In the 19th century, this was notably solved by Charles Garnier's design for the Paris Opera, which has a luxuriant inventiveness of detail and baroque wealth of form that are the epitome of le style Napoleon III. Clearly, Washington hoped that Stone's design would be to the Kennedy style what Garnier's was to the Second Empire...