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By Vivien Schweitzer
and Matthew Westphal
19 Oct 2006
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| From top: a view from the Plaza of the Carnival Center, the Knight Concert Hall, the Ziff Ballet Opera House. |
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| photo by Robin Hill |
"If you build it, they will come," wrote Fred Tasker in the Miami Herald just before the October 5 opening of the Carnival Center for the Performing Arts, Miami's brand-new $450 million complex designed by star architect Cesar Pelli.
Tasker added, though, that patrons might have trouble parking in the "gentrifying but still gritty" part of Miami where the center is located.
Both the gritty and the gentrified are welcome at the Carnival Center, whose artistic director, Justin Macdonnell, told the Herald in a separate article that he "would never want a degree of formality in clothing to be a barrier here. Paris and Vienna opera-goers can keep their stiff dress codes and snotty glances."
But don't get too excited about seeing sandy patrons strolling straight in from the beach. "The opera," said Justin Moss, director of marketing and communications for the Florida Grand Opera, "is probably the last thing in the world that you cannot be overdressed for."
Patrons can wear what they want, but they'll be strutting their stuff in front of an unfortunate beige paint job in the opera house — according to James S. Russell, the architecture critic for Bloomberg News — and under what "seems to be the bottom of a salad bowl that hangs from the ceiling."
"Beige is not the architect's friend," says Russell. Though it might set off all those nice Miami suntans.
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| From top: the Ziff Ballet Opera House; terrazzo floors and soaring ceilings in the lobbies; the Knight Concert Hall; the exterior of the Carnival Center.
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| photo by Robin Hill |
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