New Toronto hall sounds great - Canadian Architecture News

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New Toronto hall sounds great

Archiseek / Canada / News / 2006 / September 23

The most companionable, the most easygoing of big cities, Canada's largest is the anti-Dallas. Conspicuous consumption just isn't done; brand names aren't brandished. When Dallas set out to build an opera house, the design contract went to one of the world's highest-profile practices, London's Foster and Partners. Toronto, by contrast, went with a respectable local firm with international reach, Diamond and Schmidt Architects. What Toronto's brand-new Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts and Dallas' Margot and Bill Winspear Opera House, planned to open in 2009, have in common is acoustical consultant Robert Essert. Architecturally, the Four Seasons is generic modernism understated to a fault. But an inaugural Canadian Opera Company production of Wagner's complete Ring of the Nibelung this month showed off well-nigh ideal acoustics for opera: almost eerily transparent but also spacious, with an even frequency response and a good balance between stage and pit. The opera house faces University Avenue, Toronto's north-south Champs Elysées, a couple of blocks west of the space-age City Hall. A big glass facade, stayed by slender vertical cables and horizontal shelves of sandwiched glass, is balanced at the left by a boxy, black-bricked box-office entrance.

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