Andrew Clements declares the new La Forza a consummate disaster. Muti, whose departure may have been about more than scenery, was the only reason the Royal Opera House wanted the production in the first place, and when he cut out, “the company was left with the part of the package it never wanted: a staging of monumental awfulness. The music director, Antonio Pappano, gamely took over in the pit, but the Royal Opera deserves little sympathy for the mess, since it had been happy to compromise artistic standards in the first place by importing the show just to pander to an overrated conductor.”
Tag: 10.19.04
Scared Of The Daylight
Office construction is on the rise in the U.S., but new studies suggest that the workers who spend an ever-increasing percentage of their lives in those concrete monoliths are suffering from a lack of daylight. “There is a striking lack of understanding by CEOs, boards and corporate real-estate executives that designing buildings with greater access to daylight saves money and improves productivity and the bottom line.” Great architecture is all well and good, but why can’t architects design buildings for the people inside as well as the people on the street admiring the facade?