Toronto Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts | ?m | 5s | COC | Diamond Schmitt

As a result of my discomfort with sheer drops, the view down into the City Room from Ring 5 level is a thrilling experience. Sometimes I go up into steerage just to look over into the abyss. And there's a Jack Diamond glass roof up there, which makes it all the more special.

And I love the fancy lounge. Nothing will stop me from swanning through there now and then - certainly not the fact that I'm not a member.

The little pre-performance performance when the lights dim - excepting the balcony-front lights and those on the undersides of the Rings and creating a brief rococo moment before we plunge into darkness - is always a delight.
 
Aside from the typeface on the front, you;ve managed to identify exactly the ONLY detail I hate.

Stagey "lowering" lights at theater performances! AAAH!

At least they don't have some idiot play three notes on a xylophone.
 
I squirm with delight when it happens and we're briefly plunged into the eighteenth century. Please don't take away my Marquise de Merteuil moment - Jack Diamond wouldn't have installed dimmers if he hadn't wanted me to go there.
 
A fan of the Lincoln Center experience, I take it?

I particularly like it when the socialite falls down the stairs.
 
Rituals are part of operagoing - arriving, promenading, drinkies at intermission, the dark, the light, the transition between the two, crossing the threshold into the hall, the orchestra tuning up, people watching, departing into the night etc.
 
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Goodness gracious, my dear, I don't need to do it.

Some spangled bimbo invariably does it for me, to the delight of all polite society.
 
Ladies Mile said:
Yes, I haven't had a chance to visit the inside of La Bastille. It does look a bit grim from outside.

The old one is the biggest hunk of junk in the city, and given that it has the Madeline, the Eiffel Tower and the Pantheon for company, that's saying something.
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you are certainly lucky that you are far from such distasteful monstrosities (and also so close to world-beating landmarks such as "the four seasons centre for the performing arts"!)

you are a critical anthology of one, but it is fun to watch you sneeringly establish toronto, ontario as the greatest architectural spectacle of the western world.
 
Feel free to cling to naked cupids and tin-foil gilding.

Plenty of good architecture in Paris, just very little of it post 18th century.
 
Please excuse my aggressive tone, but I have tired of the idea that the 19th century was some storehouse of lost craftsmanship or treasure trove of splendor. It was a time of rapid slum growth, driven by factory work and punctuated with some of the ugliest buildings ever erected on this planet. The only decent bits were those that led directly away from the 19th century's two-faced embrace of the satanic mills on one hand and sham Gothic/Baroque fake upper-class romanticism on the other--to whit, the development of industrial materials and the new approach to architecture exemplified by Sullivan and a handful like him.

I can see the factories as a necessary evil, yes--without them we wouldn't have established a general middle-class way of life for millions of people (although millions more are still left behind globally). But I am not going to fake cultural orgasm over heaps of sequined rubble that deck chandeliers an salons with glittering gems and confine servants to quarters and staircases unfit for shipyard rats.
 
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