Paul Andreu, the French architect of the Beijing Opera House
In July 2007, Paul Andreu will have completed one of the most significant construction projects of his long career: the Grand National Theatre of China - an island of culture in the middle of a lake in the very centre of the Chinese capital.
It will have taken almost eight years for the country’s most long-awaited cultural venue and the symbol of the new China to be brought to fruition. The Grand National Theatre of China, sited on Chang’an Avenue, some 500 metres from Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City, will house three auditoriums, an opera house seating 2,416, a concert hall, a theatre and exhibition spaces. "The Beijing Opera House, the central feature of the complex, will be a Baroque pearl sitting on the water," points out the French architect.
A pharaonic building project
Paul Andreu, aged sixty nine, is no newcomer to the Middle Empire. He has already built the Pudong airport and the Shanghai Oriental Art Centre. He is currently working on the design for a new administrative campus at Chengdu and an urban development project for Nanjing. Today he is perhaps the most famous Frenchman in China thanks to the Pharaonic project of constructing the Beijing Opera House, on which nearly 4,000 builders toiled day and night for five years on a gigantic site to raise from the ground this huge futuristic dome of titanium and glass, surrounded by an immense ornamental lake measuring 35,000 square metres.
The construction of the Beijing Opera House is the culmination of a long career for this former student of the prestigious "Ecole Polytechnique" who became an architect in the late 1960s and has manifested his talents all over the world. Known in France especially as the designer of Roissy-Charles-de-Gaulle airport and its many terminals, the Grande Arche of La Défense and the Courchevel Olympic ski run, he has exported his expertise all over the world.
For nearly forty years, the designer of Roissy worked on some sixty airport terminals and built over twenty of them on behalf of Aéroports de Paris, from Chile to Japan via Egypt. It was not until 2002 that he decided to stand on his own two feet and set up his own architectural agency. An admirer of Charles Garnier (the architect of the Opéra de Paris) and a passionate art lover, this ambassador for French architecture abroad has been awarded the most prestigious prizes (the 2006 Crystal Globe from the International Academy of Architecture, the French national Grand Prix for architecture).
Julien Nessi
Journalist
For further information
Le Grand Théâtre national de Pékin. Comment réussir un opéra de Charles Garnier à Paul Andreu, [The Beijing Grand National Theatre. How to build an opera house, from Charles Garnier to Paul Andreu], by Gérard Fontaine, pub. Agnès Viénot, 2003.
J’ai fait beaucoup d’aérogares, [I’ve built a lot of airports], by Paul Andreu, pub. Descartes & Cie, 1998.
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