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Ok cos I'm bored I'm actually going to answer this moron sincerely, and hopefully make a general point about the vacuousness of this whole class of "retvrn" posts
That's a pic of the main stairway of the Palais Garnier- an opera house designed by Charles Garnier for the Paris Opera at the behest of Emperor Napoleon III of France. It's a classic of Beaux-Arts architecture and really interesting source for talking about late 19thc France
To answer Mr Critic's question head-on, it looks like that because it was a site of social performance. 19thc opera culture was in large part about being seen by your fellow audience members, not watching the show - they didn't even lower the lights during shows until the 1870s!
The point of the opulence in the room is not just aesthetic pleasure - it is to enhance the social standing of the people in it. This was extra important because under Napoleon III, France was devastatingly unequal AND a lot of people were suddenly getting very rich very quickly.
So, the visual language of the room caters to a cultural insecurity for these neveau-riche bourgeois people: a place where they can show that they're just as decadent and sophisticated as France's older, traditional elite.
So point 1, if you're keeping track: the Palais Garnier looks the way it does because of a confluence of cultural trends that were specific to a moment in time. When the culture changes, the visual language of architecture changes with it.
But more interesting to me is the implication that the Palais Garnier was part of some continuous cultural tradition that died out with the rise of "modernism" or whatever. Literally nothing could be further from the truth.
Modern Paris looks the way it does because Napoleon III commissioned a city planner, bureaucrat and all-around monomaniac called Georges-Eugène Haussmann to redesign the entire central city from scratch.
There were a number of reasons Napoleon III did this, but an especially important one was to defend the power of his state: the then-winding medieval streets of central Paris were great for insurgents to hide out and fight street-to-street. Wide boulevards would allow soldiers to
move quickly through the city and crush dissent. Good news if you are (to pick a random example) the head of an upstart dynasty that just set up a new regime through a coup!
Haussmann's plan involved basically demolishing the entire central city and laying down an entirely new street plan. Five hundred buildings were demolished to make way for the Palais Garnier ALONE.
The people who had lived there for hundreds of years were displaced and overwhelmingly priced out of the new housing stock. They fled to the suburbs - contributing to the dynamic you see in Paris today, with an ultra-wealthy core surrounded by ultra-deprived suburbs
Fundamentally there's nothing "traditional" about the Palais or Haussmann's Paris - it's actually the prequel to the MODERNIST mega-developments that bulldozed cities in the 20th century
"Oh but it's prettier" yeah. I know it's prettier than brutalist rectangles or stalinkas or whatever. But we're obviously talking about something a bit more substantive here than aesthetic preferences.
I get into fights with people who follow these accounts regularly, and every time I do they tell me I just "don't understand the point" they're making. But the "point" is almost too facile to acknowledge.
If, tomorrow, Prague or Edinburgh or Florence announced they were bulldozing their historic centres to build luxury housing and a gaudy new opera house, these guys would be rightly appalled
But magically that doesn't apply to Palais Garnier, basically because it has columns on it. That is an infantile idea of what "traditionalism" or "traditional architecture" means.
I absolutely love classical and baroque architecture. We'd be much better off if we were building more of it and doing a better job preserving what we have. But that's just an aesthetic preference: it won't make us more enlightened/trad/based/whatever you want
Plus, isn't it more interesting to study buildings for what they actually are, instead of flattening everything down into "has columns = based" and "is concrete = depraved"
Culture Critic and people like him don't give a shit about the history they claim to love, except insofar as it's useful for prosecuting their culture war. It all may as well have sprung out of the ground yesterday. And that, THAT, is modernist
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Ronen @RonenV
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Apr 3, 2023
great thread if you like culture history