Model of a decorative sculpture for the New Paris Opera,

ca. 1865

Durandelle created an archaeological survey in reverse with his hundreds of images of ornamental sculpture for Charles Garnier’s Paris Opera (dedicated in 1875). This improvised arrangement of pseudo-antique plaster elements is stacked, probably on a workshop roof, before an unassuming<br>backdrop of neighborhood buildings. Beneath the ground floor of the sixteenth-century Louvre Palace, Durandelle documented an excavation that exposed<br>the remains of the site’s underlying twelfth-century castle. The glare of his magnesium flash reveals an orderly space that has taken shape twice, first when constructed out of raw materials and again, centuries later, through the removal of<br>tons of fill dirt.