Compare and contrast the architectural style of the Paris Opéra and the Wainwright Building. What do they reveal about architecture in the nineteenth century?

What will be an ideal response?

The ideal answer should include:
1. Charles Garnier used a practice called historicism to design the Opéra, concealing a cast-iron frame with a lavish overlay of nonstructural "neo-Baroque" decoration, which recalls an earlier period of French greatness.
2. Gilded decoration, exuberant sculpture, and a lavish mix of expensive, polychrome materials cover the Opéra's foyer, and a great, sweeping staircase served as a stage on which members of the Parisian elite could display themselves.
3. In the Wainwright Building, the Chicago School found an American alternative to historicism by using steel framing to create a building with an entirely new vertical emphasis.
4. The Wainwright Building is taller than it is wide, and its design emphasizes this; corner piers rise in uninterrupted lines to the cornice, their verticality echoed and reinforced between the windows by small piers, designed to suggest the steel framing beneath them.