Beaux-Arts Beauty Stands the Test of Time in Paris

PARIS — The longtime host venue of the Biennale, Grand Palais — with its hulking, column-filled stone base; glowing, larger-than-life atrium; and monumental, rounded glass-and-metal roof — is a textbook example of Beaux-Arts architecture.

Born at Paris’ venerated art and architecture school, École des Beaux-Arts, the hallmarks of the movement from the 19th and early 20th centuries are classical weightiness, grandeur and tradition combined with a technologically aided focus on lightness, uplift and intricate ornamentation. Not surprisingly, Beaux-Arts buildings can be discovered throughout Paris, offering insight into an optimistic, gilded age in which designers were simultaneously mining the past and the future for inspiration. Here are a few of the best.

What better place to start than at the birthplace of Beaux-Arts architecture, École des Beaux-Arts? The school is in the Sixth Arrondissement, between the lovely Boulevard St.-Germain and the even lovelier Seine. Its centerpiece, at the far end of an entry courtyard, is the Palais des Beaux-Arts, which was designed in 1840 by Félix Duban, a graduate of the school. The Palais’ regimented, templelike stone facade is filled with Roman-style arches and pilasters, and emblazoned with the names of great Renaissance artists and architects.

When you walk inside you’re enveloped in the ethereal shimmer of its Cour Vitrée, which recalls a Roman gallery, full of classical motifs and statuary. It’s topped with a soaring glass and iron roof (added in 1863) revealing the sky. While you’re there, explore the academy’s other buildings, spanning from the 17th to the 20th centuries. Not too far from here, you can find another Beaux-Arts enchantment: Jules André's cavernous Grande Galerie de l'Évolution, presenting thousands of animal species, and anchoring the south end of the majestic Jardin des Plantes.

Most visitors are well aware of Musée d’Orsay, the former Gare d’Orsay train station converted in 1986 into what has become the second most popular Paris museum after the Louvre. But most are not aware that it’s also one of the city’s best examples of Beaux-Arts architecture. Victor Laloux’s masterpiece, completed, like the Grand Palais, for the 1900 Universal Exposition, has a huge blond masonry base festooned with large arched windows, frilly stone garlands and classical balustrades and pediments. Its massive, barrel-vaulted ceiling, skinned with floral-etched coffers and glowing glass squares, opens up a stunningly sweeping space crossed by bridges and edged by blocky galleries.

The most famous section of the museum, its unparalleled collection of Impressionist art, is on the top floor, but don’t skip equally valuable, less-crowded areas like the rooms full of Art Nouveau designs from around Europe. While you’re at it, try to visit more of Paris’ splendid Beaux-Arts train stations — with their ornate facades and cavernous glass-and-steel interiors — including Gare du Nord, Gare de l’Est, Gare de Lyon and Gare St.-Lazare.

From Rue de Richelieu, you can hardly tell that France’s former national library, now called Bibliothèque Nationale, Site Richelieu, (Dominique Perrault’s Bibliothèque Nationale François Mitterrand is now the library’s main location), is one of the city’s greatest built wonders.

Designed by a renowned graduate of École des Beaux-Arts, Henri Labrouste, the severely austere stone facade reveals only stern Roman pediments, Corinthian pilasters and a few more classical touches. But walk inside, and you’re wonder-struck.

The 1867 library’s main hall, the Labrouste reading room, is flooded with space and light thanks to an otherworldly series of colorfully decorated domed skylights, supported by tall, thin cast iron columns.

Its rounded stone arches are filled with books and landscape murals, and even its 400-some dark wood desks, with their bulbous green glass lamps, take your breath away.

Believe it or not, there’s an even larger reading room in the complex — Jean-Louis Pascal’s glass-topped Salle Ovale — but it’s closed until 2020 for renovations.

For an equally jaw-dropping taste of Labrouste’s skill, visit Bibliothèque Ste.-Geneviève — topped by two long, tube-shaped ceilings — near the Panthéon. Closer to the Site Richelieu, explore Charles Garnier’s fabled Paris Opera. While it matches the scale and loftiness of Beaux-Arts design, it’s generally categorized as Neo-Baroque because of its level of ornament.

The Grand Palais was the center of attention at the 1900 fair, and it still is on the Avenue Winston Churchill, wedged between the Champs-Élysées and Eugène Hénard’s Beaux-Arts Pont Alexandre III, with its arched spans, weighty pillars and gold-plated statues. But its neighboring sibling, Charles Girault’s Petit Palais (originally called Palais des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris), is arguably a more sublime example of Beaux-Arts.

Wrapped around a lush, semicircular courtyard and entered through a richly layered stone and glass gateway, the museum, which presents French art from the 19th and 20th centuries, truly evokes a palace, with its vaulted, light-filled halls; eye-popping murals, frescoes and porticos; and intricate, curving ironwork and ornament.

It’s one of the city’s best surprises, a place that could be overlooked only in a metropolis with an embarrassment of riches like Paris.