From the south and east, on Richmond and York streets, Toronto’s new opera house is a sober expanse of dark bricks. And yet these high, understated walls are anything but forbidding. Depending on the light or the time of day, the bricks mutate from thundercloud grey to chocolate brown to cindery charcoal. They contain mysterious glints, now copper, now gold. It’s like the fine fabric of a man’s dinner jacket, sombre wool-and-silk suiting with the subtlest of shimmers. That’s it—the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts (to give Canada’s first purpose-built opera house its proper name) is an elegant dinner jacket. It’s brawny and plain and expertly tailored at the back. The glamour and controlled flash—the diamond studs, the silk lapels—are reserved for the Queen Street and University Avenue sides. There, glassy walls of exceptional clarity reveal a festive reception room, zigzagging staircases with no visible means of support and—starting this fall—five storeys of opera- and ballet-goers. As for the corsage…

Let’s not get carried away with the suit metaphor. Jack Diamond, the opera house’s principal architect, doesn’t believe in creating a building around an idea. Unlike many designers, he finds architectural metaphors “a crock,” if not downright misleading. He doesn’t want to name names, and although there’s a giant metaphor growing up the street at the Royal Ontario Museum, the word “crystal” never leaves his lips. “You arrive at the sublime or poetic not by metaphor,” he says, “but by making virtues out of necessity. That’s the secret of design.”

With a tight site, a limited budget and—most daunting of all—the complex shopping list of essential components for a modern opera house, the Four Seasons Centre’s “necessities” are easy to identify. The virtues Diamond has crafted out of them are formidable. He’s built a democratic house for the most elitist art form, without sacrificing any of opera’s high style. Outside, he’s knitted the building into the bustle of Queen Street and the stateliness of University Avenue so deftly it’s hard to remember that it hasn’t always been there. Inside, he’s found a way to make the traditional horseshoe-shaped opera theatre look contemporary, lighthearted, even playful.

When you consider the building’s tortuous history, it’s a wonder anything got built. A dedicated ballet-opera house was first dreamt up in the free-spending, luxury-loving 1980s. By 1990, it had a site, at Bay and Wellesley; an architect, Moshe Safdie; and a $350-million budget. At that point, then premier Bob Rae pulled the plug—it cost too much, and the cash-strapped government had more pressing priorities. The decree left the arts community feeling embattled and Ontarians righteously indignant about public money being used to support an expensive pastime for rich people.

Richard Bradshaw, the general director of the Canadian Opera Company and the engine behind the opera house, was fairly new to the city at the time (he’d moved here from directing the San Francisco Opera in 1989). He now sees Rae’s decision as a blessing. Calling the ’80s design a “Taj Mahal” one minute and a “white elephant” the next, Bradshaw says the veto forced them to rethink their priorities and concentrate on what they really needed, as opposed to every last bell and whistle.

For a while, in this humbled frame of mind, Bradshaw favoured refitting the old Consumers’ Gas Company building on Parliament (now Police Division 51), which they could have bought from the city for $1. Because of its rundown location, it was known at the COC as “Richard’s trench coat site.” Ultimately, the “fur coat site” forces prevailed. In 2002, after intense bureaucratic hurdles and heavy lobbying, the province donated the land at the southeast corner of Queen and University, and Bradshaw was looking at a budget of $150 million, less than half of what was allocated for the first building. He was also looking at it alone, as the National Ballet’s then artistic director, James Kudelka, decided that raising the necessary funds would be too taxing. The ballet would be the new building’s main tenant, and the Four Seasons Centre would be designed, first and foremost, for opera. Karen Kain, who became the NBC’s artistic director last summer, describes Kudelka’s decision as that of “a choreographer at the helm who wanted to do as many of his works as possible,” rather than participate in the fundraising for the building. Personally, she says, she wonders if that was a mistake, but she praises Bradshaw for having “the persistence and the guts” to make the opera house happen.