Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Opera Architect to the Rescue

Opéra National de Paris - Bastille
"Tata Consultancy Services — or T.C.S., as the company is known — is spending $200 million on its Siruseri campus and has hired the Uruguayan-born Canadian architect Carlos A. Ott, who designed the opera house on the Place de la Bastille in Paris. The company is also building big
campuses in Ahemdabad, Pune, Calcutta and Hyderabad."

Carlos Ott (born October 16, 1946 in Montevideo) is a Uruguayan architect who resides in Canada. He became famous when he won the first prize in 1983 (among 744 architects from all over the world) for the construction of the Opéra de la Bastille in Paris, which was inaugurated on July 14, 1989 (bicentennial of the French Revolution).

The new campus of Tata Consultancy Services in Chennai. (Photo: Kuni Takahashi/The New York Times)
In 1983, Ott won the international design competition for the Opera de la Bastille in Paris, France, to commemorate the 200 year anniversary of the French Revolution on July 14, 1989. Carlos Ott was selected from 744 participants as one of the three finalists and then hand-picked by Francois Mitterrand, President of France, as the winner of this prestigious project. In order to carry out the supervision of this project, he moved to Paris and formed a team, which in turn gave him international recognition and opened doors to many countries.

In 1997 he was invited to participate in the competition for the Jiang Su Opera House, (Nanjing, China) where he obtained first prize. As a result, he was invited into another series of very important competitions such as the Beijing Opera House, the Commercial and Residential GW Plaza, and won the contract for the National Grand Theater of Hangzhou, China from yet another international competition. He won after Dong Guan Yulan Theatre, the Wenzhou National Theatre and the Henan Art Centre. In front of the Hangzhou Grand Theatre was selected to build the Hangzhou International Conference Center including a 5 stars hotel of more than 400 rooms.