Photographs from Paul
Andreu Architects 251007
National Grand Theater of China
-
Paul Andreu Architects
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
The Beijing National Grand Theatre: a cultural island in the middle of
a lake. The building is situated in the heart of Beijing on Chang An Avenue
next to the Great Hall of the People and about 500 meters from Tian An
Men Square and the Forbidden City.
It is a curved building, with a total surface area of 149,500 square meters,
that emerges like an island at the center of a lake. The titanium shell
is in the shape of a super ellipsoid with a maximum span of 213 meters,
a minimum span of 144 meters and a height of 46 meters). It is divided
in two by a curved glass covering, 100 meters wide at the base. During
the day, light flows through the glass roof into the building. At night,
the movements within can be seen from outside. The building houses three
performance auditoriums – a 2,416-seat opera house, a 2,017 seat
concert hall and a 1,040 theatre – as well as art and exhibition
spaces opened to a wide public and integrated into the city. The building
is connected to the shore by way of a 60-meter long transparent underpass.
This entrance leaves the exterior of the building intact, without any
openings and mysterious looking while providing the public with a passage
from their daily world to the world of opera, fiction and dreams.
The areas inside that are open to the general public take the form of
an urban district with its succession of different spaces: streets, plazas,
shopping areas, restaurants, restful spaces and waiting lounges. This
public area is highly developed in order to endow the building with its
open, popular character. The complex is designed as an open forum not
a place for elitist shows. The different performance auditoriums open
onto this common concourse. Their entrances are positioned so as to ensure
an even distribution of people, and a smooth, easy flow everywhere while
giving each element in the project a distinctive character.
The opera house is at the center. It is the single most important element
in the project, and by the art that is practiced there, it is the one
that is most dependent on convention; most mysterious too. The concert
hall and the theatre are situated on either side of the opera house. Access
to the performance halls must never be brutal. It has to be something
gradual, something that requires time and space. The performance halls
and public areas are built on a base that houses all operating and support
facilities in a complex designed to be as efficiently and economically
organized as an industrial production area. At the same time, this technical
utility area never mars the harmony of the public areas and the pleasure
of visitors and theatre-goers. Paul Andreu architecte
ARCHITECTS•ENGINEERS•PLANNERS
The National Grand Theatre of China
The opera house is covered in a gilt metal mesh. It is opaque over the
walls and when the areas behind it are unlit but it becomes partially
transparent when there is light in such as way that it reveals what is
there while creating a distance. The spectators enter the opera house
through one of the two big doorways in the gilt ring wall. When they cross
this threshold they penetrate into a world of vertical circulation that
takes them even farther away from the outside world and draws them near
the point in time and space when the show will begin. From the lobby,
they are still visible in the distance created by the partial transparency.
The wall thus expresses closure and separation but also, and more significantly,
the psychological and symbolic distance that has to be crossed to gain
access to the world of theatrical conventions. The whole project can be
defined as a play on successive envelopes, passages and crossings, transparency
and light. A lounge on the highest level under the roof affords the general
public and theatre-goers alike with a view of the city all around that
varies at different times of the day. From here, the city can be rediscovered
from a hitherto unseen perspective.
The decision to build the Grand National Theatre in a place of such historical
and symbolic import clearly testifies to the importance given to culture
in its relationship with history and the contemporary world. In such a
context, it was out of the question to make an obscure, less prominent
building of lesser importance. But neither could it pretend to be an isolated
structure onto itself. For this reason, we strove to create a building
that shows respect for the buildings around it, each of which marks in
varying degrees the history of architecture in China, but that demonstrates
the vitality of modern architecture by being as bold as they were in their
day. We have sought to achieve this harmony through a combination of modesty
and ambition, agreement and opposition, and have made improvements at
every stage thanks to the valuable comments and suggestions we received.
But we never lost sight of what we considered essential from the start:
that the Beijing National Grand Theatre be part of the fabric of the city,
a theatre in the city, a new district of spectacles and dreams open to
one and all.
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