Jean Louis Charles Garnier (1825-1898) was a French architect of the exuberant neobaroque style, an outgrowth of the effervescent but stricter classicism of Napoleon III's Second Empire style that began in the early 1850s.

Charles Garnier was born on Nov. 6, 1825, in Paris. He attended the École de Dessin, the atelier of Louis Hippolyte Lebas, and the École des Beaux-Arts in 1841, and he also worked for Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc. Garnier spent 5 years in Italy after winning the Grand Prix de Rome in 1848.

Garnier entered the competition for the Académie Nationale de Musique, better known as the Opéra, in Paris in 1861. He won fifth prize in the first stage of a two-phase competition and later that year won the commission. The Opéra was built from 1862 to 1867; the interiors were not completed until 1874. Sited on an irregular diamond adjacent to the...