A €170 million concert venue that will stage everything from Haydn to hip-hop will be unveiled on an island in the Seine this month.
La Seine Musicale, as the silver, egg-shaped building has been named, will give Paris a venue to rival other major European cities such as London for classical and contemporary music, officials said.
The building was designed by Shigeru Ban, the Japanese architect, and Jean de Gastines, his French partner.
Set on the site of a former Renault carmaking factory on Île Seguin, to the west of the capital, it will house a 1,150-seat classical music auditorium and a 6,000-seat pop and rock venue. There will also be recording studios, exhibition halls and shops.
The resident Insula orchestra will stage an inaugural series of concerts playing Mozart, Weber, Beethoven Haydn and Berlioz. Cameron Carpenter, the rebellious American organist, is also scheduled to play.
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West Side Story will be staged in the autumn while Michel Sardou, the 69-year-old French crooner, will perform at the end of the year.
Officials say they hope that La Seine Musicale will become the home of Parisian music, from classical to electronic and hip-hop.
Jean-Luc Choplin, head of programme, said that he wanted “everything from baroque to rock. Nothing will be excluded and everything will be treated the same way.” He said that he wanted concerts that were “different in style and substance”.
One plan, for instance, is for a concert that ranges from “Handel to Jimi Hendrix”.
The project was built with €120 million of public money and the auditorium will receive a subsidy running to millions of euros a year to put on classical music. Mr Choplin hopes that the pop venue will also help to subsidise the project.
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“The auditorium will have more classical concerts where it is difficult to make a profit, whereas the big hall will be hired out for rock concerts where it is possible to make money,” he said.
The island resonates in French minds as the site of a Renault factory for 63 years during the 20th century. In its heyday 23,000 workers were employed to produce cars such as the Renault 5 there — when they were not engaging in some of France’s most memorable strikes.
François Pinault, a billionaire tycoon, wanted to turn it into an art gallery after the factory closed in the 1990s. Jean Nouvel, the star architect, planned offices there, but in the end officials chose to turn it into a music venue.
La Seine Musicale says on its website that the building was designed to recall the site’s industrial past while “playing with the reflections on the water”. It will become a “symbol of western Paris” and will enable people from all walks of life to have access to music.
The architects said that it looked like an “egg protected by vitrified wood resin”. They added: “The building recalls the image of a great ship.”
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A new classical music hall, the 1,900-seat Philharmonie de Paris, opened in 2015 in an impoverished district in the north of the city. Managers said that it had disproved claims by critics that it would never attract music lovers.