The Opéra Nouvel ( Nouvel Opera House ) in Lyon , France , is the home of the Opéra National de Lyon . The original opera house was re-designed by the distinguished French architect, Jean Nouvel between 1985 and 1993 in association with the agency of scenography dUCKS scéno and the acoustician Peutz. Serge Dorny was appointed general director in 2003.
8-658: In 1756, one of the first opera houses created inside an existing freestanding building was opened in Lyon. It was designed by Jacques-Germain Soufflot , the architect of the Panthéon in Paris. By early in the following century it was found to be too small, and Antoine-Marie Chenavard and Jean-Marie Pollet erected the new Lyon theatre which opened on July 1, 1831. It was considered rather undistinguished, but served its purpose. It
16-698: A church dedicated to Saint Genevieve . Soufflot was born in Irancy , near Auxerre . In the 1730s he attended the French Academy in Rome , where young French students in the 1750s would later produce the first full-blown generation of Neoclassical designers. Soufflot's models were less the picturesque Baroque being built in modern Rome, as much as the picturesque aspects of monuments of antiquity. After returning to France, Soufflot practiced in Lyon , where he built
24-582: The Hôtel-Dieu , like a chaste riverside street facade, interrupted by the central former chapel, its squared dome with illusionistic diminishing coffers on the interior. With the Temple du Change , he was entrusted with completely recasting a 16th-century market exchange building housing a meeting space housed above a loggia. Soufflot's newly made loggia is an unusually severe arcading tightly bound between flat Doric pilasters, with emphatic horizontal lines. He
32-547: The limited backstage space of the 19th-century theatre still remaining. Jacques-Germain Soufflot Jacques-Germain Soufflot ( French pronunciation: [ʒak ʒɛʁmɛ̃ suflo] , 22 July 1713 – 29 August 1780) was a French architect in the international circle that introduced neoclassicism . His most famous work is the Panthéon in Paris , built from 1755 onwards, originally as
40-612: The royal buildings in Paris. In the same year, he was admitted to the Royal Academy of Architecture. In 1756 his opera house opened in Lyon. The Panthéon is his most famous work, but the Hôtel Marigny built for his young patron (1768–1771) across from the Élysée Palace , is a better definition of Soufflot's personal taste. Soufflot died in Paris in 1780, and is buried in the Panthéon next to Voltaire . Like all
48-414: The space within the house by excavating below ground to create rehearsal space and, most strikingly, by doubling the height of the building by creating a steel and glass barrel vault which hid the fly tower as well as providing space for the ballet company. It has been noted that this achievement was "an architectural tour de force, in which the past has been successfully wedded to the future..", albeit with
56-592: Was accepted into the Lyon Academy. A more creative trip to Italy was made when the mature Soufflot returned in 1750 in the company of the future Marquis de Marigny , the talented young brother of Madame de Pompadour , who was being groomed for his future as director of the King's Buildings ( Bâtiments du Roi ). On this trip Soufflot made a special study of theaters. In 1755 Marigny, the new Director General of Royal Buildings, gave Soufflot architectural control of all
64-467: Was not until 1985 that the City decided to once again re-build the opera house, but this time it was to be within the shell of the existing 1831 building. One of France's most distinguished architects was commissioned to create the house. The style of the house is essentially Italian with a horseshoe-shaped auditorium and tiers of boxes. Leaving only the existing foyer and the exterior façade, Nouvel tripled
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