Designed by French architect Paul Andreu, the theatre is located near
Beijings famous Tiananmen Square and Forbidden City. It is tipped to become an
important landmark in the capital.
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.
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.