Theatro Municipal de São Paulo

This guide to the Theatro Municipal de São Paulo opens with an old contradiction in theater design: an opera house needs a dry, quick sound for sung words, while a concert hall needs a long, warm bloom of reverberation for an orchestra. It follows engineer Ramos de Azevedo and architects Claudio and Domiziano Rossi as they broke ground in 1903 and modeled the hall on the Paris Opera, working mostly on instinct. Look for the four curved corner panels tucked into the corners above, called tympana.