The architect Jack Diamond (1932-2022) died last week. He was perhaps Canada’s leading architect. Yet no-one would refer to him as a starchitect. “It’s easy to do an iconic building,” he once said, “because it’s only solving one issue.” Diamond’s designs were never one-dimensional. His opera house in Toronto is a traditional horseshoe-shaped auditorium situated within an unprepossessing blue-black brick box whose chief feature is a glazed lobby facing one of the city’s main streets; dramatic, but hardly iconic—very Canadian. At $150 million in 2008, the cost of the Four Seasons Centre was modest as opera houses go, but more important was how the money was spent—on the hall and the interiors rather than on exterior architectural effects. Sadly Diamond would not be attending the gala reopening of his last project, the redone David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center. The New York Times’ Michael Kimmelman, writing about the architecture of the hall, was rather mealy-mouthed in his back-handed compliment, “it is like the second-best-looking man in an old Hollywood film: generic, attractive enough, ceding center stage to the star, which is the music.” But ceding center stage to the music is the whole point, isn’t it?
