Economic Impact
The Ballet Corporation and The Opera House Corporation were advocating for a new home in the 1980s. As with all building ventures government and private industry begin collaborating on joint efforts involving shared expenditures. Following a design competition won by Moshe Safdie approval for a new building at Bay and Wellesley was underway and demolition of existing properties began for a $311,000,000 project in 1988. In 1990 a new NDP government was elected and this costly project was scrapped due to its costs in an economic climate where excessive spending was not being supported. The Canadian Opera Company and The National Ballet of Canada never gave up hope of a new building and in 2002 presented to the government plans for a new building later to be called The Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts. Since a large hotel chain, Four Seasons was contributing millions of dollars into this project it was agreed that the name Four Seasons would remain part of the new building name. Architects from Diamond and Schmitt won the design contest and three years of construction lead to the opening of a building at 145 Queen Street West at a cost of $181 million dollars in 2006. This modern building is known for having long floating glass staircase and an auditorium that is in the shape of a horseshoe shaped 2035 seat auditorium with exceptional acoustics.
Read more about this topic: Four Seasons Centre
Famous quotes containing the words economic and/or impact:
“Weapons are an important factor in war, but not the decisive factor; it is people, not things, that are decisive. The contest of strength is not only a contest of military and economic power, but also a contest of human power and morale. Military and economic power is necessarily wielded by people.”
—Mao Zedong (1893–1976)
“One can describe a landscape in many different words and sentences, but one would not normally cut up a picture of a landscape and rearrange it in different patterns in order to describe it in different ways. Because a photograph is not composed of discrete units strung out in a linear row of meaningful pieces, we do not understand it by looking at one element after another in a set sequence. The photograph is understood in one act of seeing; it is perceived in a gestalt.”
—Joshua Meyrowitz, U.S. educator, media critic. “The Blurring of Public and Private Behaviors,” No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press (1985)