Considered as one of Europe's last remaining Art Deco picture houses (theatre and music venue) and also as the biggest (seating 2,800 people), Le Grand Rex, located at 1 Boulevard Poissonnière, 2nd arrondissement of Paris, witnessed the golden age of cinema.
Easily featured in all the best architectural guides to the French capital, Le Grand Rex was built by film producer Jacques Haïk and designed by French architect Auguste Bluysen with Austrian-American architect John Eberson as consultant.
Eberson is actually unanimously considered as the architect of the dream, since he invented the atmospheric theatre in the '20s.
The interior of atmospheric theatres was usually decorated with colums, rooftops and foliage that recreated an outdoor setting.
Eberson's movie palaces exuded dreamy and exotic styles since he used to take inspiration from the Orient and from Islamic, Greek or Spanish art and architecture.
Eberson designed over three hundred theatrers in his career, scattered all over the world, from North America to Mexico.
Le Grand Rex opened in 1932 and, as the years passed, it turned into a symbol of old school filmic grandeur, that's why I really love this building.
If you're a fan of Art Deco and you're in Paris, apart from Le Grand Rex you may want to check out the Metropolis exhibition (until January 2012) currently on at the Cinémathèque française.
The event allows visitors to rediscover the film script, drawings by set designers Erich Kettelhut and Otto Hunte, the female robot reconstructed by Walter Schulze-Mittendorff, photographs, posters and costumes from the private collection of German film critic, writer and curator of the Cinémathèque française Lotte H. Eisner, who was a close collaborator of Henri Langlois and also a friend of Fritz Lang.
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