Abstract

The Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, Toronto's first purpose-built opera facility, was constructed in the early 2000s as part of a substantial investment in the city's cultural infrastructure that brought about a short-lived period of developing cultural buildings, commonly known as Toronto's Cultural Renaissance. For developing the opera facility, the Canadian Opera Company pursued a strategy that marked a distinction from the approach of many of its local and international rivals. Instead of commissioning celebrity architects for a spectacular iconic design — a strategy that, by the end of the twentieth century, had become part of a prevalent trend of developing cultural buildings all around the world — the Opera Company strove to build a humble-looking structure, designed by a Toronto-based architectural firm. Against the backdrop of Toronto's Cultural Renaissance developments, which involved the construction of a few world-class urban icons in the city, this research explores the reasons behind the Opera Company's distinct approach. While critical studies concerned with positioning architecture in its socio-political context often concentrate on interrogating cases of iconic buildings, especially since such architectural products are generally considered the most likely outcome of conditions of neoliberal globalization, this work contends that iconic architecture is not the only manifestation of the appropriation of architecture by the powerful. By borrowing from Bourdieu's theory of practice, it points to the implicit nature of architecture's complicity in processes of power and explores alternative pathways through which architecture can retain capitalist interests in urban space. The research emphasizes the importance of investigating architectural products that are considered banal and ordinary, especially since such cases have often remained at the margins of critical examination.