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Jun 08, 2023

Jean Nouvel, Lyon Opera House from Domus archive

“Today, the semicircular roof-vault on the Lyons Opera-house tranforms the view of the city’s historic centre. A landmark on a metropolitan scale, it also signals the city’s largest and most

“Today, the semicircular roof-vault on the Lyons Opera-house tranforms the view of the city’s historic centre. A landmark on a metropolitan scale, it also signals the city’s largest and most distinguished cultural building. Its expressive impact unfailingl brings to mind the roof of the Palazzo della Ragione at Padua or of the Basilica at Vicenza”. In 1993 Jean Nouvel completed an intervention consecrating him as a designer capable to “metamorphize a context without brutally imposing himself upon it” – there had already been proof of this with the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris completed in 1987 and more would follow – and it is with these words that an essay by Jacques Lucan for Domus introduced the work, and its creator.

The renovation of the historic building is both simple, almost doubling the volume with a High Tech barrel vault, and highly complex, with the dematerialization of the vault itself in its glass envelope and in the continuous tension created by the extreme sequences of vertical and horizontal spaces. The project, which immediately became an architectural milestone for an entire era, was published on Domus in September 1993, on issue 752.