BASTILLE OPERA HOUSE IN PARIS

Competition project 1983  (mention-award) 
with Aldo De Poli; collaborators: Roberto Accorsi, Daniele Casolari, Fulvio Onestini, Marco Pampani 

The new Maison de l’Opera Bastille can be well defined as a City of Theater because of the multiplicity of spaces and equipment for the production and representation of theatrical works.

The project area, Place de la Bastille, is he symbolic place of the French Revolution, of which this work is intended to celebrate the next Bicentenary, and at the same time the place of convergence of the central and popular-traditional districts of Paris, at the junction of primary road axes. 

On the Place de la Bastille, the new building announces that it is a theater with a semicircular façade perforated by three orders of arched loggias, crowned by a attic: it is a mention of the Colosseum, the building synonymous of Theater for the architects of the Italian Renaissance. Of that “Colosseum sive Theatrum”, which still in the nineteenth century inspired the architecture of theaters, in particular that of Gottfried Semper.  

On the Rue de Lyon, a regular succession of 20-meter high pilars, connected by an entablature, recalls a triumphal ‘via colonnata’. 

On the Rue de Charendon, a building-front often interrupted by passages fits well into the texture of the existing quarter.