SANCTUARIES OF BLISS

There was laughter here, dancing, gambling, celebration. Theatres, ballrooms, spa halls and casinos were the places people came to in order to be happy, together and for one evening free of worry. SANCTUARIES OF BLISS visits them after the last curtain has come down.

The tiers are empty, the gilding has dulled, the light comes through windows nobody opens any more. And still something of the anticipation people carried in with them hangs about these rooms. The rustle of dresses, the instruments tuning, the moment the house lights go down and the stage comes up. The joy that was shared here is easier to feel than in any place still full of people, perhaps because nothing distracts from it now.

These houses were built to celebrate what people do together. Their scale was not display for its own sake but a setting for the many who wanted to be glad at the same time. The plasterwork, the gilding, the mirrors: all of it served the occasion. Now you stand in them alone, and the silence has something of the moment when the applause has faded and nobody wants to leave.

In an age growing steadily more digital and more solitary, they stand like monuments to another way of living. To a time when being together was not one option among many but the whole point of the evening. You look at these halls and understand what disappears along with them.

SANCTUARIES OF BLISS is a reminder that happiness burns brightest where people share it, and that the rooms built for it still say so, even empty.