The Berlage Sessions: "The Paris Opera House" by Christopher Mead

Описание: The Paris Opera House is the outcome of a public competition. The decision in 1861 to open the competition to anyone—instead of a closed competition among invited contestants— answered to nascent ideas of democracy even if France at the time was ruled autocratically by Emperor Napoléon III. Unlike the muddled outcomes of the competitions held in 1840 for Napoléon’s Tomb in Paris and in 1850 for the Crystal Palace in London—which pushed aside winning contestants in favor of appointed architects—the Opera competition concluded decisively in the selection of Charles Garnier. Over the next fifteen years, Garnier oversaw the construction of one of the most complex public buildings to be commissioned by the nation of France. Its success stemmed from a process of design selection and development guided by architects who, like Garnier, trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. The two-part competition was managed by a jury composed mostly of architects, who deflected the state’s political agenda in favor of professional expertise. While the state championed the project by the Gothicist Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc—a favorite of Empress Eugénie—the jury selected the young and unknown but academically trained Garnier. And because the competition selected a qualified architect based on a preliminary project, Garnier only finalized his design under the supervision of Félix Duban, a government architect from the Council of Civil Buildings. Even then, the Opera’s construction in staged phases meant that the design could be refined still further, since technical drawings were produced sequentially as needed.

The Berlage Sessions is a thematic seven-part seminar series focusing on scholarly research and critical approaches to the history and theory of architecture and urban design. This semester’s theme, “Building Competitions,” explores architectural competitions as opportunities of ex- perimentation. Lecturers will examine the histories, politics, policies, and processes of canonical architectural competitions, from the mid eighteenth century to the present. Contributors include George Baird, Tim Benton, Urtzi Grau, Kersten Geers, Christopher Curtis Mead, Katherine Solomonson, Alejandro Zaera-Polo, and David T. van Zanten.

Christopher Curtis Mead is the Emeritus Regents’ Professor of Architecture and Professor of Art History at the University of New Mexico (UNM), where he taught from 1980 to 2013. From 2004 to 2009, he served as Dean of the College of Fine Arts, when he helped establish a new Interdisciplinary Film and Digital Media Program. He has written and lectured widely on European and American architecture and urbanism, including books on the architects Robert Venturi, Bart Prince, Charles Garnier, and Antoine Predock and Victor Baltard. He is the author of Charles Garnier’s Paris Opera: Architectural Empathy and the Renaissance of French Classicism.