La Géode

Interesting facts

Behind the mirrored skin sits a completely separate inner sphere of reinforced concrete weighing about 6,000 tonnes, held up by a single central pillar 17 metres tall.

A consultancy hired in 1982 to name the dome proposed options such as Bouboule, Irma and Zézette; the national audit court later criticised the fee, and none was chosen.

The name finally adopted, La Géode, was not on the consultants' list: it was picked for the dome's likeness to a mineral geode, a stone shell hiding a crystal core.

The steel triangles deliberately do not touch, keeping the mirror unbroken and letting panels expand in the heat; rain slipping between them drains into the pool.

Geometrically, the dome is built by subdividing each edge of an icosahedron into ten segments and projecting the resulting triangles onto a sphere.

President François Mitterrand inaugurated La Géode on 6 May 1985, a year before the neighbouring Cité des Sciences itself opened to the public.

Its original hemispherical screen measured 26 metres across, and the auditorium seats were raked at 27 degrees so the audience leaned back into the picture.

Attendance reached about a million in its first year but had fallen below 300,000 by 2016, as immersive formats became commonplace elsewhere.

Twelve loudspeaker posts set in the pool around the dome form a clock face; since 1990 they have marked hours, minutes and seconds with sounds bouncing off water and steel.

For a month in late 2003 the sphere was wrapped to look like a giant football, and for Nuit Blanche 2018 it was turned into a monumental Tesla coil.

Why it is worth it

Seen from across the canal basin of the Parc de la Villette, La Géode hardly looks like a building at all: a sphere 36 metres across, skinned in 6,433 polished stainless-steel triangles, each about a metre and a half long, that turn the sky, the trees and the passing clouds into a slightly warped mirror image of themselves. On a grey Paris day it almost disappears; at sunset it catches fire. The ball sits in a shallow pool beside the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie, so that it is reflected twice over, once in its own skin and once in the water below.

The sphere was designed by the architect Adrien Fainsilber, who also converted the vast former abattoir hall next door into the science museum, with the engineer Gérard Chamayou. Behind the mirrored panels is a lattice of 2,580 steel tubes resting on a reinforced-concrete base. It opened on 6 May 1985 as a dome cinema of the Omnimax type, one of the showpieces of the new park that replaced the city's slaughterhouses at La Villette, and for a generation of Parisians it was where you went to fly over canyons or drop into the ocean on a screen of about 1,000 square metres that wrapped around and above the audience.

After closing at the end of 2018, the dome spent six years under refurbishment and returned on 18 December 2024 as Pathé La Géode. The single auditorium now seats about 300 and uses a laser IMAX projector made for dome screens, alternating hemispherical documentaries with feature films on a flatter native IMAX image. The appeal, though, is still the same double act: the steel sphere outside as a landmark of 1980s Paris, and inside it the steeply raked seats tilting you back under a picture that fills your entire field of vision.

Getting there

La Géode stands in the Parc de la Villette in the 19th arrondissement, in the north-east of Paris, about 1.5 km from the heart of the Buttes-Chaumont district. The nearest metro stations are Corentin Cariou on line 7 and Porte de Pantin on line 5, each a short walk through the park. Paris-Orly Airport (ORY) is about 18.5 km away as the crow flies.

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La Géode

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

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