The Palais Garnier

Judged on plan, section and structure, under purpose and site. The parti resists the subtractive test. Each function has its own volume, and the volumes rise in the order the use requires: the low entrance front, the dome over the hall, the fly tower highest because scenery must rise its full height above the stage, then the offices and workshops behind. The two pavilions answer two kinds of arrival. The stair and foyers, which take as much of the building as the hall, are compelled once the opera is granted as an evening of society whose intervals are half its use. What yields is the surface: much of the sculpture, the marbles, the gilding and the lesser orders of ornament could go and the house would serve as before. It spends far past what its purpose compels, and stands above the cap, not far above.

Score: 7.8 / 10

What can be stated, and holds: in this society the audience is the spectacle as much as the stage, and the opera house is a machine for seeing and being seen. The building says it in space, not in words. The stair is a stage ringed with balconies for spectators, the foyer a promenade for the intervals, the boxes small salons turned toward one another as much as toward the stage. It states rank, one entrance for the sovereign and another for the subscribers, and it states the regime’s choice of pleasure as its public monument, at the meeting of its new avenues. That account of the Second Empire’s culture outlived the Empire. Held at 8.0: the disclosure is the beneficiaries’ own, flattering and without cost shown, and much of what the building gives is opulence, which is a mood.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Height and frequency are both high, in one register, splendour. Elevation comes in the front seen down the Avenue de l’Opéra, gilded groups against the sky over the green dome; in the passage from the low, dim vestibule, past the Pythia at the foot, into the stairwell, where the volume opens upward through three storeys of balconies and the marble branches divide and return; in the Grand Foyer, long, gilded and mirrored, opening onto the loggia over the city; in the red and gold hall under the lit chandelier and the painted ceiling; and at the curtain. The building is designed as a sequence of such moments and renews them at every interval. Held off the top: the register is festive magnificence, never dread or vastness, and for some the surfeit dulls the height. It does not reach the transport of the great vaults.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Three patterns are built into plan and section. The ascent: from the street through a low threshold to the stair, rising to the hall. The theatre within the theatre: the stair a stage on which the spectators play before the play. The stage as sanctuary: the highest volume, crowned by Apollo raising his lyre over the house, so that the axis runs from the city to the god of music. The reservoir under the stage became an underworld in Leroux’s novel of 1910, and that myth is credited to reach and presence, not here. The rest is evoked: the Muses, Harmony and Poetry, the Danse, the composers’ busts, allegory as ornament. Held below the gate because the archetype is largely the iconographer’s, and the myth built is a society’s self-display more than a deep pattern.

Score: 7.9 / 10

The inheritance: the French and Italian horseshoe theatre; Victor Louis’s Grand Théâtre at Bordeaux (1780), with its great stair and colonnaded front, which Garnier answered; the theatres at Mainz and Semper’s first at Dresden, which had already shown the auditorium as a volume outside; and the academic classicism of the École. The departure: the circulation made equal to the hall, the stair and foyers raised to the chief rooms; a polychrome, plastic eclecticism, Venetian, Michelangelesque and baroque at once, against academic restraint; and the functions made to read as a cluster of volumes from every side. The stake was real: a little-known architect of thirty-five over established names, and a programme that ran through two regimes and fourteen years. Held below the gate: a synthesis carried to its limit inside a proven path, in the regime’s own manner.

Score: 7.8 / 10

Substitute another form and the evening is lived differently. In an ordinary theatre one passes from the street to a seat; here going to the opera is a procession, through vestibule and avant-foyer, up the stair in view of the balconies, and at the interval out into the Grand Foyer and onto the loggia over the avenue. The form makes the audience visible to itself, which is the purpose as the building understands it. The pavilions make arrival an expression of rank. The back of house, as large as the front, made it a working institution, with stage, workshops, rehearsal rooms and, for a century, the ballet school under one roof, and the form has carried a change of use from opera to dance without strain. Held below the top by the hall: a conventional horseshoe, where many seats in the boxes see part of the stage.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Evidence over promise, across a century and a half. The building has been read as the summit of Second Empire architecture and as its excess; dismissed by the rationalists in Viollet-le-Duc’s line and by the modernists; and recovered by the later reassessment of the Beaux-Arts and by study of Garnier’s theory of the building. The questions stay open: eclecticism as a style or as the absence of one, whether a programme of display is a meaning, what Chagall did to the hall. It has yielded to fiction and the stage, from Leroux to the musical, and to painting, in Degas’s dancers. Held lower because much of the return is to the legend and the history rather than to new knowledge of the form, which, once its parti is seen, is clear.

Score: 8.1 / 10

Standing since 1875, scored on force and reach together, in the field of the European theatre of its century and the opera house as a type. The intrinsic force is real: it fixed the opera house as a civic palace of display, the hall one room among the stair and foyers, every function a volume. But it is the culmination of a tradition, not a reorganisation of possibility, and that holds the force down. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: wide and bounded. It became the model of the grand opera house for forty years, in Garnier’s own Salle Garnier at Monte-Carlo (1879), the Theatro Municipal at Rio de Janeiro (1909) and the opera house at Hanoi (1911), and its stair became a type of the ceremonial stair. The modern movement cut the line after the First World War, and it returned as the type later houses departed from.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Weighed on form, use and fabric together, over one hundred and fifty-one years since the opening. The form survives whole: plan, sequence, stair, foyer, hall and fly tower are Garnier’s and in place, and have outlived the Empire that commissioned them, the Republic that finished them and the society they staged. The use has run without a break as a house of opera and dance, through two wars; since 1989 the main opera repertory has gone to the Opéra Bastille and the building is chiefly the ballet’s, a narrowing of its first use, not a loss. The fabric has been restored and cleaned rather than rebuilt. Charged lightly: the Danse on the front a copy, the first ceiling hidden. Presence is among the widest of any theatre, through Leroux and the musical; it earns at most a tenth, and the narrowed use holds the figure at 9.1.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The command of planning is of the first rank and load-bearing: a vast programme ordered on one axis and two cross-axes; the movement of sovereign, subscribers, public, artists and staff kept apart and each led to its place; the stair resolving several levels and routes in one space; the work of dozens of painters and sculptors brought into one scheme under one hand; a substructure that has carried the stage over its reservoir for a century and a half. The costs: the structure is concealed rather than expressed, a choice and not charged, but the engineering extends little; the hall’s sightlines are poor from many boxes; and the ornament is often handled by accumulation. Command of the plan outruns command of the whole.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the gilded Grand Foyer and the fly tower over the stage, display and machine. They obey one law, the parti, in which every function has its volume and its rank along the axis, so that the plainest workroom and the richest salon belong to one order. A second law governs the surface: polychrome plasticity, coloured marbles, gilded bronze, figure sculpture and curved masses, carried from the front through the stair to the hall, with Venetian, Roman and baroque sources made to obey it. The range is wide. What bends it: the surface law is kept by profusion more than by rule, and in places it blurs into accumulation; and the Chagall ceiling, part of the one work, sets a modern painter’s floating colour and figures at the centre of a hall built to another physics, at the point the eye goes to.

Score: 8.1 / 10

Orders held: the arts, music, dance, painting and sculpture in one building; society and class, in the boxes, the subscribers, the upper galleries and the separate entrances; the state, in the sovereign’s pavilion and the regime’s monument at the meeting of its avenues, finished by the Republic; the city, an axis of Haussmann’s plan answered by the front and the loggia; labour, in the stage, the workshops, the machinery and the rehearsal rooms under one roof with the salons; the body, in the dance; myth as allegory. Front and back of house stand on one axis, so the orders are integrated, not listed. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: the sacred except as borrowed figure, the natural order, which the building shuts out, the household, death, and history except as quotation of styles. A house of spectacle holds a society at its pleasure, and the figure describes the form.

Score: 7.6 / 10