La Géode
Adrien Fainsilber and Gérard Chamayou (Fainsilber 1932 to 2023) · 1985
A perfect sphere of mirror steel, thirty six metres across, rests in a shallow pool of water in front of the museum, reflecting the sky, the clouds, the trees and the people who walk around it. Everyone photographs it and nobody quite believes it. Come close and the surface breaks into thousands of triangular plates, each slightly curved, that turn the reflection into a soft mosaic; walk around it and the whole park slides across its skin. Inside is a cinema with a hemispherical screen a thousand square metres in area, where the audience lies back in steeply raked seats and the image fills their whole field of view.
The Géode is a geodesic structure of the kind pioneered by Buckminster Fuller, but it stands on a single concrete pillar rather than on the ground, which is why it seems to float. The engineer Gérard Chamayou worked out the frame and the cladding of six thousand four hundred and thirty three polished stainless steel triangles, none of them touching, so that the sphere can breathe with changes of temperature. The pool around the base doubles the reflection and hides the services. Look at the way the joints between the plates are aligned in great circles, giving the ball its faint geometric grain.
The Géode opened in May 1985, almost a year before the Cité itself, and became at once one of the symbols of modern Paris. For more than thirty years it showed large format films on nature, space and science. It closed in 2018 for a complete refit and reopened with new laser projection and a wider programme that includes concerts and special screenings. Check the programme if you want to go inside; if not, the outside is spectacle enough, particularly at sunset.
Did You Know? Because the plates are curved rather than flat, the sphere reflects a slightly enlarged and softened version of whatever stands in front of it.
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