Lyon’s Grand Hotel-Dieu: From Ornate Medical Facility Into Upscale Shopping Center

Positioned on the right bank of the Rhone River, the Grand Hotel Dieu was once the storied hospital for the famous, transient and destitute. Its imposing façade was originally designed to impress visitors crossing from the left bank. The commanding chapel and grand dome resemble a manor on a luxurious scale rather than its original commissioned purpose.

The complex, constructed in 1184, served as a sanctioned meeting location and house of refuge for the clergy stationed within the city or passing through. In 1495, King Charles VIII became a patient returning from Naples and suffering from an advanced case of syphilis.

Its Middle Age employment as a hospice was offered to those poorest and most needy. The architects envisioned, as with Burgundy’s Hotel Dieu located in Beaune, that monumental design and lavish décor stimulated healing. The contrasting ideology regarding the poor today resembles a paradox.

In 1532, Franciscan and Benedictine monk Francois Rabelais would compose his classic Gargantua and Pantagruel during his residency. Rabelais shouldered the blessing or curse of being considered a freethinker. He is considered one of France’s initial great prose authors. His humanist writings attracted criticism from both Calvinist sects and the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. His satirical characters depicted grotesque, larger-than-life personalities.

He was critical of medieval religious scholarship and powerful individuals, lampooning their abuses and personalities with humor. He was clearly an individual ahead of his time and uncomfortably close to a royally imposed elimination.

The Hotel Dieu ceased its function as a hospital in 2010 and became converted into an upscale shopping, garden and dining center featuring the 144-room luxury Intercontinental Hotel. The entire property was opened to the public in the spring of 2018. Extravagance and superior architecture remain throughout exemplified by the exceptional detailing in the hotel lobby and attached former chapel offering an elegant and lofty 100-foot high dome and vaulted ceilings.

The contemporary paradox towards the health care once offered to the impoverished ill has made lavish structures such as the Grand Hotel Dieu archaic. Their suffering ranks are consigned towards indifferent hospital care or worse, ignored abandonment upon callus urban streets.