Charles Garnier said the building was the staircase. He meant it literally.
When Garnier, a 35-year-old architect who had never built anything of significance, won the 1861 competition to design Paris's new opera house, he made a radical decision. The stage and the auditorium were not the main event. The staircase was.
The Grand Escalier (Grand Staircase) was conceived as a theater before the theater. Guests would enter, and the staircase — rising nearly 100 feet (30 meters) through a vault of painted ceilings and colored marble — would begin watching them. The steps were designed deliberately shallow so that women ascending in full gowns moved in a slow, visible glide. Every balcony above was a vantage point. Every landing was a stage.
The marble came from three countries. The white steps from Seravezza, Italy. The balusters from antique red marble quarries. The base from green marble in Sweden. The 30 flanking columns, each one carved from a single uncut block of stone, arrived from across what remained of the French Empire.
Construction took 14 years and survived a war. When the opera house finally opened in January 1875, the Second Empire that had commissioned it was already gone. Napoleon III had died in exile two years earlier. The republic that replaced him inaugurated the building anyway.
The staircase is still there, unchanged.
Have you been inside?