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AlvinofDiaspar
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From the Star:
Diamond bright, Diamond hard
Building forged by clashing egos
Creator relentless — and `brilliant'
Jun. 13, 2006. 06:10 AM
MOIRA WELSH
STAFF REPORTER
Here is what Richard Bradshaw, the intractable director of the Canadian Opera Company, thinks of Jack Diamond, the tenacious architect who designed Toronto's new opera house:
"Brilliant. Obsessed. And sometimes unaware that his excitement in what he is trying to convey is seen as a form of arrogance — aggressive arrogance."
In the competitive drawing rooms of Toronto architects there is chatter about the size and vitality of Diamond's ego. No one will say this on the record. But some will generously set aside the time to tell how they would have built the opera house had the contract not gone to Diamond in 1998 after the opera company's second-round call for proposals.
The reason why Bradshaw wanted to deal head-on with the Diamond ego issue is simple:
Diamond's character has a certain largesse. He is an architect, a painter, social activist, a political junkie, and friend of Mayor David Miller. He is, by all accounts, intelligent, egocentric, artistic, relentless, curious, ambitious and, it seems, unsurpassed in his ability to argue a point.
"But in the end," says Bradshaw, "what he has produced is a building of great elegance."
In other words, nobody ever said that alpha males are easy.
Abel (Jack) Diamond grew up in the South African city of Durban, on the Indian Ocean, home of the Zulus, colonized by the British. He was the only Jewish boy in a class of English schoolchildren. That made him different and his classmates taunted him, the moniker of "Christ killer" being the most memorable.
Diamond describes himself as a "very tiny boy" who spent hours playing alone, painting, drawing houses and conducting inner monologues in which he was able to influence people to change their behaviour for the greater good.
"For as long as I can remember, I drew plans and I drew streets. I drew places that I wanted for myself. It gave me a sense of protection, of ordering my world," Diamond says.
"I realize now why Superman and Spider-Man are so important to children. Because they have no power and their attraction to someone with super-duper power who comes to the rescue of the oppressed is hugely appealing.
"I had to invent that for myself. I invented talking to large crowds and moving them in my direction. I had a kind of messianic view about making things better for people. It was from living in a very racist world, where as a child I was conscious of, or maybe it was because of, the prejudice to which I was subjected, I felt a huge empathy, a terrible sympathy for the humiliation among black people and their maltreatment."
As a young man, Diamond became an anti-apartheid activist but ultimately decided he did not want to raise children in a fascist country. "At that point, you either had to become engaged, which meant long jail terms and worse, or leave. And I decided to leave."
After studying architecture at the University of Cape Town, he moved on to Oxford University. He played rugby for both universities and in England was asked to compete against archrival Cambridge University, for which he received Oxford's coveted Blue award. Diamond's face shines with boyish delight when he describes how, at 14, he shot up in height (he's 6-foot-1) and realized that he could compete in team sports "on even terms with anybody."
He played across Europe and when the team travelled he'd pull out a pocket box of watercolour paints to capture ancient buildings, a move that occasionally raised an eyebrow among his rugby mates.
"I remember reading that Churchill was also a very lonely child," Diamond says. "He said, `Being an outsider gives you insight.' So among my rugby-playing friends, my sexuality was suspect because of my watercolours. (He laughs.) Of course, among my architectural friends it was, `Here's a jock who is on the rugby team.' I rather revelled in that — being in, and not in, either camp."
He studied at the University of Pennsylvania, and moved north to teach at the University of Toronto. It was here that Diamond fashioned a career creating buildings that people found warm, welcoming and infinitely workable, like the YMCA and the Regent Park Health Centre. Internationally, he designed Israel's Foreign Ministry, a building that shimmers with gold when natural light filters through translucent onyx walls.
He has built homes, beautiful homes, in Toronto and on the Caribbean island of Mustique. He is currently working on a Shakespearean theatre in Washington, D.C., and a new community that is revitalizing Bulgaria's waterfront.
There's that word.
Waterfront. Toronto waterfront.
It hangs in mid-air and Diamond's face reddens. In a minute, he will wrestle it to the floor and stomp on it with his polished leather loafers, but first he explains why the word has such a painful association for him.
Diamond's firm, Diamond Schmitt Architects, was among the five firms shortlisted by the Toronto Waterfront Redevelopment Corp. to propose a development plan for the East Bayfront waterfront, between Yonge and Parliament Sts.
It was an opportunity for Diamond to create an architectural legacy on the lake, a project that could transform the city. He did not win. The project went to the Boston firm of Koetter Kim.
In 2002, Diamond says, he was approached to create a waterfront design for the Toronto Economic Development Corp. (TEDCO), a city-run agency mandated to find the best economic use of the waterfront lands.
Diamond says he turned down TEDCO's initial request because he wanted to compete in the waterfront agency's call for proposals. He said TEDCO asked him to work as a consultant on its Queen Elizabeth Docklands property if his plan was not chosen.
When Diamond lost, he went to work for TEDCO and the proposal TEDCO put forward was largely the same as the plan the waterfront agency rejected.
Two years later, Mayor David Miller attended one of his first meetings with the waterfront agency's board and demanded it find a solution between its plan and TEDCO's proposal for the land it controls on the waterfront.
Toronto Star columnists pointed out that Miller was nowhere to be found on the waterfront but later came out swinging in favour of Diamond who, they noted, was co-chair of his 2003 election campaign.
And this is why the waterfront, for Diamond, has a peevish unpleasantness.
"The Star screwed me as far as Miller is concerned," Diamond says. "The fact that the mayor actually liked what I did and took my views seriously, he was accused of showing preferential treatment.
"I was humiliated. I was totally clean, totally wronged. The city lost because they didn't adopt what I profoundly believe to be a way better scheme."
Diamond suggested building communities of close-knit residences along the waterfront, with a mix of retail stores and a narrow boardwalk along the lake. As he talks about the winning plan, his voice escalates, the boyish gleam in his eye turns hard, like a star rugby winger reliving the untenable loss of the championship game.
He criticizes the winning proposal for having too much retail space and wide parks that will be merciless when the winter winds blow off the lake.
"You don't do it by creating a big park where people won't make it across in the winter and in the springtime, when the snow banks melt, you find the bodies. Exaggerated. Slightly. But the waterfront is windswept. It's a winter city. We've got to make a winter waterfront as well as a summer waterfront. The open space of the city down there is the lake. Not a park. And in their park they have a water feature. A water feature? The lake is the water feature. I mean, DUH!"
Miller is still miffed.
"Frankly, I've never understood the criticism that there is something that seems improper for me to listen to one of Canada's most premier architects," Miller says. But he believes that parts of Diamond's waterfront vision made it into the new plan, which he says now has a stronger sense of Toronto's neighbourhoods.
Miller is careful to denote his precise relationship with Diamond. "I wouldn't say it was a friendship. ... We are friends, but we don't see each other that often. It was a ... city-building friendship. We talked every few months. On the phone."
Miller is running for re-election this fall. Diamond won't be back as co-chair.
Diamond's energies have been absorbed by the opera house and the ongoing give-and-take with Bradshaw, director of the opera company who describes their partnership as both fabulous and trying.
"Jack and I may lock horns because we are both intransigent," Bradshaw says. "But he understood the music better than anyone I can imagine. It was with such pride that I would go around the opera houses in Europe and hear the way Jack questioned or suggested or dreamed of what they might have done better and (the directors') obvious tremendous respect for his command of the situation."
Among their battles, there is one they are willing to reveal. It involves the paint tones in the theatre. Bradshaw thought Diamond's original Roman ochres and reds on the balconies were too light, making it extremely difficult to light the stage without distractions from the room. The two men clashed.
"At one point," recalls Bradshaw, "we had a fairly sharp exchange of messages about this business. I had written a rather aggressive letter to Jack and he wrote a really charming reply. It finished with the words, `However, I think our relationship should remain colourful.'"
Early in the battle, Diamond insisted they rethink their entire approach to staging opera, so that his colour choice would prevail. It was when Ernie Abugov, stage manager for the National Ballet of Canada, stood up at a meeting and told Diamond of his exact same concerns that the architect's mind began shifting to the possibility that he could accept this loss, and still win.
"I have a tendency to listen to men in jeans, T-shirts, with a batch of keys and a cellphone on their belt," Diamond says. "They know what works."
He mixed the new "mauve mud" tone with his watercolour paints.
"It is really quite perfect."
AoD
Diamond bright, Diamond hard
Building forged by clashing egos
Creator relentless — and `brilliant'
Jun. 13, 2006. 06:10 AM
MOIRA WELSH
STAFF REPORTER
Here is what Richard Bradshaw, the intractable director of the Canadian Opera Company, thinks of Jack Diamond, the tenacious architect who designed Toronto's new opera house:
"Brilliant. Obsessed. And sometimes unaware that his excitement in what he is trying to convey is seen as a form of arrogance — aggressive arrogance."
In the competitive drawing rooms of Toronto architects there is chatter about the size and vitality of Diamond's ego. No one will say this on the record. But some will generously set aside the time to tell how they would have built the opera house had the contract not gone to Diamond in 1998 after the opera company's second-round call for proposals.
The reason why Bradshaw wanted to deal head-on with the Diamond ego issue is simple:
Diamond's character has a certain largesse. He is an architect, a painter, social activist, a political junkie, and friend of Mayor David Miller. He is, by all accounts, intelligent, egocentric, artistic, relentless, curious, ambitious and, it seems, unsurpassed in his ability to argue a point.
"But in the end," says Bradshaw, "what he has produced is a building of great elegance."
In other words, nobody ever said that alpha males are easy.
Abel (Jack) Diamond grew up in the South African city of Durban, on the Indian Ocean, home of the Zulus, colonized by the British. He was the only Jewish boy in a class of English schoolchildren. That made him different and his classmates taunted him, the moniker of "Christ killer" being the most memorable.
Diamond describes himself as a "very tiny boy" who spent hours playing alone, painting, drawing houses and conducting inner monologues in which he was able to influence people to change their behaviour for the greater good.
"For as long as I can remember, I drew plans and I drew streets. I drew places that I wanted for myself. It gave me a sense of protection, of ordering my world," Diamond says.
"I realize now why Superman and Spider-Man are so important to children. Because they have no power and their attraction to someone with super-duper power who comes to the rescue of the oppressed is hugely appealing.
"I had to invent that for myself. I invented talking to large crowds and moving them in my direction. I had a kind of messianic view about making things better for people. It was from living in a very racist world, where as a child I was conscious of, or maybe it was because of, the prejudice to which I was subjected, I felt a huge empathy, a terrible sympathy for the humiliation among black people and their maltreatment."
As a young man, Diamond became an anti-apartheid activist but ultimately decided he did not want to raise children in a fascist country. "At that point, you either had to become engaged, which meant long jail terms and worse, or leave. And I decided to leave."
After studying architecture at the University of Cape Town, he moved on to Oxford University. He played rugby for both universities and in England was asked to compete against archrival Cambridge University, for which he received Oxford's coveted Blue award. Diamond's face shines with boyish delight when he describes how, at 14, he shot up in height (he's 6-foot-1) and realized that he could compete in team sports "on even terms with anybody."
He played across Europe and when the team travelled he'd pull out a pocket box of watercolour paints to capture ancient buildings, a move that occasionally raised an eyebrow among his rugby mates.
"I remember reading that Churchill was also a very lonely child," Diamond says. "He said, `Being an outsider gives you insight.' So among my rugby-playing friends, my sexuality was suspect because of my watercolours. (He laughs.) Of course, among my architectural friends it was, `Here's a jock who is on the rugby team.' I rather revelled in that — being in, and not in, either camp."
He studied at the University of Pennsylvania, and moved north to teach at the University of Toronto. It was here that Diamond fashioned a career creating buildings that people found warm, welcoming and infinitely workable, like the YMCA and the Regent Park Health Centre. Internationally, he designed Israel's Foreign Ministry, a building that shimmers with gold when natural light filters through translucent onyx walls.
He has built homes, beautiful homes, in Toronto and on the Caribbean island of Mustique. He is currently working on a Shakespearean theatre in Washington, D.C., and a new community that is revitalizing Bulgaria's waterfront.
There's that word.
Waterfront. Toronto waterfront.
It hangs in mid-air and Diamond's face reddens. In a minute, he will wrestle it to the floor and stomp on it with his polished leather loafers, but first he explains why the word has such a painful association for him.
Diamond's firm, Diamond Schmitt Architects, was among the five firms shortlisted by the Toronto Waterfront Redevelopment Corp. to propose a development plan for the East Bayfront waterfront, between Yonge and Parliament Sts.
It was an opportunity for Diamond to create an architectural legacy on the lake, a project that could transform the city. He did not win. The project went to the Boston firm of Koetter Kim.
In 2002, Diamond says, he was approached to create a waterfront design for the Toronto Economic Development Corp. (TEDCO), a city-run agency mandated to find the best economic use of the waterfront lands.
Diamond says he turned down TEDCO's initial request because he wanted to compete in the waterfront agency's call for proposals. He said TEDCO asked him to work as a consultant on its Queen Elizabeth Docklands property if his plan was not chosen.
When Diamond lost, he went to work for TEDCO and the proposal TEDCO put forward was largely the same as the plan the waterfront agency rejected.
Two years later, Mayor David Miller attended one of his first meetings with the waterfront agency's board and demanded it find a solution between its plan and TEDCO's proposal for the land it controls on the waterfront.
Toronto Star columnists pointed out that Miller was nowhere to be found on the waterfront but later came out swinging in favour of Diamond who, they noted, was co-chair of his 2003 election campaign.
And this is why the waterfront, for Diamond, has a peevish unpleasantness.
"The Star screwed me as far as Miller is concerned," Diamond says. "The fact that the mayor actually liked what I did and took my views seriously, he was accused of showing preferential treatment.
"I was humiliated. I was totally clean, totally wronged. The city lost because they didn't adopt what I profoundly believe to be a way better scheme."
Diamond suggested building communities of close-knit residences along the waterfront, with a mix of retail stores and a narrow boardwalk along the lake. As he talks about the winning plan, his voice escalates, the boyish gleam in his eye turns hard, like a star rugby winger reliving the untenable loss of the championship game.
He criticizes the winning proposal for having too much retail space and wide parks that will be merciless when the winter winds blow off the lake.
"You don't do it by creating a big park where people won't make it across in the winter and in the springtime, when the snow banks melt, you find the bodies. Exaggerated. Slightly. But the waterfront is windswept. It's a winter city. We've got to make a winter waterfront as well as a summer waterfront. The open space of the city down there is the lake. Not a park. And in their park they have a water feature. A water feature? The lake is the water feature. I mean, DUH!"
Miller is still miffed.
"Frankly, I've never understood the criticism that there is something that seems improper for me to listen to one of Canada's most premier architects," Miller says. But he believes that parts of Diamond's waterfront vision made it into the new plan, which he says now has a stronger sense of Toronto's neighbourhoods.
Miller is careful to denote his precise relationship with Diamond. "I wouldn't say it was a friendship. ... We are friends, but we don't see each other that often. It was a ... city-building friendship. We talked every few months. On the phone."
Miller is running for re-election this fall. Diamond won't be back as co-chair.
Diamond's energies have been absorbed by the opera house and the ongoing give-and-take with Bradshaw, director of the opera company who describes their partnership as both fabulous and trying.
"Jack and I may lock horns because we are both intransigent," Bradshaw says. "But he understood the music better than anyone I can imagine. It was with such pride that I would go around the opera houses in Europe and hear the way Jack questioned or suggested or dreamed of what they might have done better and (the directors') obvious tremendous respect for his command of the situation."
Among their battles, there is one they are willing to reveal. It involves the paint tones in the theatre. Bradshaw thought Diamond's original Roman ochres and reds on the balconies were too light, making it extremely difficult to light the stage without distractions from the room. The two men clashed.
"At one point," recalls Bradshaw, "we had a fairly sharp exchange of messages about this business. I had written a rather aggressive letter to Jack and he wrote a really charming reply. It finished with the words, `However, I think our relationship should remain colourful.'"
Early in the battle, Diamond insisted they rethink their entire approach to staging opera, so that his colour choice would prevail. It was when Ernie Abugov, stage manager for the National Ballet of Canada, stood up at a meeting and told Diamond of his exact same concerns that the architect's mind began shifting to the possibility that he could accept this loss, and still win.
"I have a tendency to listen to men in jeans, T-shirts, with a batch of keys and a cellphone on their belt," Diamond says. "They know what works."
He mixed the new "mauve mud" tone with his watercolour paints.
"It is really quite perfect."
AoD