Charles Garnier
Garnier was 35 and unknown when he won the competition for the new opera house in 1861. The Palais Garnier became the most lavish building of the Second Empire and a model for opera houses all over the world.
Charles Garnier was born in Paris in 1825 into a modest family; his father was a blacksmith and carriage maker. He studied at the École des Beaux-Arts under Louis-Hippolyte Lebas and in 1848 won the Prix de Rome, the most prestigious scholarship for French architects. He spent several years in Rome and travelled in Italy and Greece, where among other things he studied the traces of paint on the temple at Aegina and made reconstructions of how ancient temples were originally painted. After his return in 1854 he had only minor commissions in the city’s service, and he was largely unknown when Napoleon III’s government announced the competition for a new opera house in Paris in 1860–1861.
Garnier won the competition against 171 entries. The opera house, now known as the Palais Garnier, was built in 1862–1875. The building is planned as a sequence of spaces for both performance and social life: a monumental façade with a loggia and columns, a grand marble staircase where the audience could display themselves, a magnificent foyer and a horseshoe-shaped auditorium. Beneath the surface lies an iron structure. Its formal language mixes Renaissance and Baroque with rich polychromy and sculpture, and has been called the Second Empire style. Garnier also designed the casino and opera house in Monte Carlo, the Cercle de la Librairie in Paris and the observatory in Nice, whose dome was engineered by Gustave Eiffel.
Garnier died in 1898. The Palais Garnier became one of the symbols of Paris and a model for opera houses and theatres all over the world, from Europe to Latin America. It showed how a public building could be a stage for the social life of the city. Garnier also wrote on architecture and theatre and defended a rich, artistic architecture against the rationalism of the engineers, even though he used iron himself. In Stockholm the same Beaux-Arts ideals shaped the Royal Swedish Opera, designed by Axel Anderberg and inaugurated in 1898, with its grand staircase and gold foyer. The Royal Dramatic Theatre and several of the Swedish theatres built around 1900 also borrowed features from the French theatre architecture of which Garnier was the best-known exponent.