Palais Garnier Opera House

The Palais Garnier opera house in Paris is an intricate building that is very fascinating to study. Being a structure from France, it is not surprising that it is a complex building to reproduce. Built from 1861 to 1875, it has been called "probably the most famous opera house in the world, a symbol of Paris like Notre Dame Cathedral, the Louvre, or the Sacré Coeur Basilica.” The Palais Garnier is the setting of the novel The Phantom of the Opera. A miniature model was produced for Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s 2004 adaptation of it.

My first instinct was to use the 1x4 arches because this would allow me to reproduce more detail, but it just would have been too big, so I went with a mixture of 1x3 and 1x2 arches. When recreating buildings such as this with LEGO’s, the smaller you go the more sacrifices/compromises you must accept. Sometimes the tiny details just don’t matter in the long run.

As you can see the proportions are not exact, but I do plan on fixing this soon. As of now this is just a glorified prototype. I was pleasantly surprised as to how well this came out. I would eventually like to track down the parts in order to build it in person, which would allow me to also perfect the structure.

This is an on-going project, but please let me know what you think!