'Well, I guess I should be flattered," says Jack Diamond, the designer of Toronto's new opera house. He had just learned that he had been compared, albeit tongue-in-cheek, with Frank Gehry.
Gehry is the superstar architect whose new design for the Art Gallery of Ontario captured the spotlight in Toronto two weeks ago. But some observers were disappointed that it did not look sufficiently bizarre and Gehry-like. One even said that the art gallery plan is so restrained that it looks like Jack Diamond's work.
It's another needle in the side for an architect who upholds the modernist belief that form must follow function -- not surround it with sheafs of billowing metal that don't correspond to the rooms inside.
But Diamond won't get into a discussion of Gehry's work -- "that would be a whole other conversation." He's much happier to talk about his opera house, the future Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, which will be home to the Canadian Opera Company and the National Ballet of Canada.
Just now, the house is enjoying a brief hibernation. Heavy snow recently buried the foundations of the building and caused construction chief Darrius Zaccak to cancel the cement trucks. "You can't pour cement on top of snow," he said as the flakes billowed down. Zaccak, who loves opera, assures me the huge project is still on schedule.
But behind the scenes, the designers and engineers continue to grapple with a design that presents its own cutting-edge challenges. And time is slipping rapidly by. In the coming weeks, tenders will be let for the interior of the auditorium and the spacious lobby called the City Room. Over the next few months contracts will be signed and no further important changes will be possible.
It's the time when the craftsmen take over from the architects. "The big picture is always fun," says Gary McCleskey, the Diamond and Schmitt architect who is overseeing the opera house. "But dealing with it at the level of constructability is fascinating. The architect has preconceived ideas of what makes sense. Then you talk to the craftsmen, and they look at you and say: Look, this is how we do it."
"Craftsman" covers a lot of territory here. John Kooymans is an engineer, but his specialty is what he calls "collaborative-style engineering." Right now he's working on the staircase. That is to say, the glass staircase that will vault 14 metres across the City Room. So far as he can tell, it will be the longest unsupported glass staircase ever built. Even the treads will be glass, with steel reinforcement inside.
But the strength of the staircase, what will actually prevent it from collapsing, will be the metre-high glass balustrade, or railing, that runs its full length. It will serve the same function as the web of a steel I-beam, except that in this case only the top and bottom of the beam -- the railing you will rest your hand on, and the "shoe" below that cups the glass -- will be made of metal. The "web" of the beam will be the sheet of glass between the two delicate strips of steel.
"I haven't seen anything like it before," says Kooymans, whose company, Yolles Engineering, specializes in the delicate space where design meets brute force. "Most glass staircases have cable supports, or else the glass balustrade goes right down and rests on the floor below."
Diamond originally showed Kooymans a design for a steel staircase with steel webbing along the balustrade. Glass panels were attached to the webbing as a guard to prevent children falling through. "So we thought, if the glass is there anyway, let's use it structurally," Kooymans says.
He knew that Dupont had just come out with a product where a layer of glass is laminated to each side of a sheet of clear plastic. The sandwich is heated to a high temperature so that the plastic partially melts and anneals to the glass. "You can treat it as monolithic," he says, as if it were all the same substance with the same properties.
Kooymans brought the idea to Diamond, and they collaborated. "Together, what John and I worked out is unique," Diamond says. He felt that his initial design with a steel truss was "clumsy," and he welcomed Koymanns's "idea of using the glass as the web of a kind of I-beam. . . . And I think it is the longest glass staircase ever. It would make [vaudeville showman Flo]Ziegfeld green with envy."
Diamond also consulted with Michael Levine, who is designing all four operas in Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle, the first work to be performed in the new opera house when it opens in 2006.
It hadn't occurred to Levine that his views would be sought by the architect. "I'm a set designer, and normally a set designer doesn't think about the design of the stage itself. It's just a given. I go into the theatre and look at the stage -- the height, the depth, the shape of it -- and think, That's what I've got to work with."
The dividing line between architect and stage designer is, literally, the proscenium arch. As a rule the arch is a piece of architecture in itself, raised and decorated, standing sentinel around the stage opening.
But Diamond, in the spirit of modernism, wanted to minimize this kind of decoration. He decided instead that the auditorium walls would swoop onto the stage, with the final two metres angling into the stage opening but finished and coloured no differently than the rest of the auditorium.
And that colour would be light. Either light wood, or golden plaster. The "plaster edge," says another architect in Diamond's office, "was where our work ended."
But those final two metres of wall, which Diamond reluctantly admits do have to be called a proscenium, were angled or "canted" into the stage in order to help bounce the singers' voices out into the auditorium.
When he decided to run this design past Levine, he quickly learned that singing is not all that the proscenium wall would be bouncing back into the auditorium. "Michael raised the issue of light spill," Diamond says.
Levine pointed out that the angle of the proscenium wall would reflect not only sound but also the stage lighting. At best there would be a distracting strip of bright reflecting wood all around the stage opening. At worst the glare might blind a portion of the audience.
There was only one solution: The final two feet of the wall must be darkened, to what Diamond calls a "dark amber" colour, so it would pretty much not reflect any light at all.
The ironic outcome is that the proscenium which he wanted to make invisible would now be a dark brown slash in a light maple-coloured auditorium, as intrusive as any Victorian arch littered with plaster flowers. "A sudden change in tone, you'd feel it was an arch," Diamond says, "and that's not the idea at all."
The question isn't settled at the moment. "But we may just shade from dark to light so that there's not a shock transition."
Does it give him a pang that his golden auditorium will now have a painterly amber edge to it? Diamond says no, that his preference for a light-coloured auditorium is not especially important. What is important is to recognize the clients' conflicting requirements, and to be inspired by them.
"When you finally know what the requirement is, then you celebrate it. You don't look at it as a problem that you are fixing." Even trickier is what's going on underneath the auditorium, whose concrete base has already been poured. The next step is to install 400 "acoustic blocks," which will separate the hall from the noise of subways and streetcars. In effect, the entire hall -- concrete walls, floors, performers, stage machinery, furniture, balconies, ceiling and audience -- will be loaded onto the blocks. That's 27,500 tons. And the blocks are made of rubber.
They're currently piling up in a warehouse in the Toronto suburb of Scarborough. But a sample block was on the building site just before Christmas. It looked innocuous enough until I tried to move it. "That's about 400 pounds," cautioned Zaccak. "There's steel inside the rubber."
A specialist whose work is critical at this juncture is Steve Wolfe, an engineer and part-time radio music host in Oakland, Calif. Wolfe's company, Wilson Ihrig, has designed the rubber blocks.
He tells how the technology, designed for earthquake protection, began to appear in concert halls and opera houses 30 years ago. A cautionary tale of what happens when you don't use them is Zankel Hall, a chamber-music venue dug out underneath New York's Carnegie Hall seven years ago. Wolfe's company was involved.
"They didn't want to spend the money to do the acoustic isolation," he recalls. Within days of opening, it became clear that the rumble of the subway was going to be audible -- forever -- during delicate legato passages played by quartets and other small ensembles. "It appears they regret it," he concludes.
The acoustic blocks under Toronto's opera house will add about 3 per cent to its cost.
If girders and acoustic blocks are at the gross end of the business, other craftsmen are dealing with questions of great delicacy. Vince Perlin at Art Magic, which makes architectural woodwork, is waiting to find out how much of the auditorium is going to be faced in wood. The acousticians will ask him for wood of a certain density, and then they will ask him to sandblast the surface so it reflects sound properly.
"How much can you sandblast maple as opposed to pine?" Perlin says. "An eighth of an inch deep, that's a lot on maple. And then if they ask for a stain, we're in trouble. You can't get even stain on a rough surface. Not to the standard they're looking for." And then he'll have to tell them the cost. "They're going to jump."
The snow continues to sift down onto the building site even as, in this city and many others, builders quietly prepare their contribution, ready to plug it in when the time comes. This month, the acoustic pads will be installed. In March, the structural steel contract will go to tender, along with the glass staircase. And does anybody ever wake up in the middle of the night, wondering if they forgot something? "I don't," Kooymans says. "I wake up thinking how I could make it better."