History

The Fourvière Hôtel Lyon is located at 23 rue Roger Radisson, sitting just above the Roman theater and the Odéon and below the Basilica. It has reinvented the convent built by Pierre-Marie Bossan for the Sisters of the Visitation, who had left the nearby Croix-Rousse district due to the social unrest of the time.

The hotel opens onto the Parc des Hauteurs, a peaceful green space originally intended to house the nuns' enclosure. The neighboring Parc de la Visitation is now a public park that is very popular with local residents.

The building is a harmonious whole that alternates brick with white limestone and yellow Couzon stone rubble.

It is designed on a square plan with three floors. On the ground floor, four wings surround an enclosed cloister, forming the peristyle. The peristyle was initially accessed through the main entrance and a vestibule located in the east wing. In the west wing, the convent church is perpendicular to the cloister, as stipulated by the rules of the order. A double-flight stone staircase leads to both upper floors.

Few of the convent's original interior fittings have been preserved, since the building has experienced many ups and downs during its history. It was home to a boarding school for young girls until 1903, then housed the wounded during WWI, and was later sold to the municipality of Lyon in 1965. At the time, André Malraux and Louis Pradel intended it to be used as an architecture school. Instead, it was rented to the Hospices Civils de Lyon hospital system in 1970 and used as housing for student nurses until 1974, when it became the repository for the Archives of the historic Hôtel Dieu hospital.

The oak reception desk and the multicoloured lighting of the second-hand key cabinet echo Bossan's intuition. He had intended the chapel to be a "laboratory of shapes," a work of art that emphasized symbolic ornamentation and a profusion of rich colors enhanced with gold.

A short historical notice on the back of each door pays homage to these figures and briefly lays out their contributions to the history, and to the stories, of Lyon and elsewhere.

Reinoso has also created a sculpture path specifically for this space that unfolds from the entrance to the cloister. Fôret Fourvière, Fourvière Bench and Stopping-sur-Nuage guide travelers through the building and invite them to enter fully into the Fourvière Hôtel Lyon universe.

This sculpture path is a true in-situ work. Each sculpture is in dialogue with the architecture of the convent, offering a new reading of the spaces. This delicate work weaves a strong link between the building's historical heritage and the contemporary world. With these sculptures, Reinoso gives us the thread to unfold a story yet to be written, that of the Fourvière Hôtel Lyon.