Toronto Royal Ontario Museum | ?m | ?s | Daniel Libeskind

A KPMB-ish solution might've been a more appropriate, respectful, and successful way of dealing with Dickinson's Modernist building, given that contemporary firms like them are already working in a style that is an extension of Modernism. Honestly, I don't know whether to laugh or to cry at Libeskind's grafted-on solution.

The distant revival styles used in the 1914 and 1933 wings of the ROM, which haven't been part of the creative design vernacular for decades, are a different kettle of fish. I think they can take a more dramatic contrast, which the Crystal gives them.

OCAD hovers over a Modernist building too, but such an undistinguished old heap that it deserves to be upstaged by the whimsical tabletop.
 
Agreed. I wouldn't even mind the L Tower if it were a stand alone building. It's the fact that they want to clumisly graft it on to an already beautiful building that I don't like.

Funny, but this is how I feel about the Distillery District (plopping in tall glass condos into a Victorian gentified industrial district and ignoring the context), but I don't feel this about the ROM, which I think has worked well, despite some issues with some of the details. And I like the L Tower. I guess it really about people's own opinions.
 
Funny, but this is how I feel about the Distillery District (plopping in tall glass condos into a Victorian gentified industrial district and ignoring the context), but I don't feel this about the ROM, which I think has worked well, despite some issues with some of the details. And I like the L Tower. I guess it really about people's own opinions.

Well, that's the difference isn't it. It's been done well in the Distillery District and the ROM. Clumisly at the O'Keefe Centre.
 
A monster task - putting Gordo together
Buried in the ROM vault for 45 years, one of the largest beasts to roam the Earth will finally go on display


ANTHONY REINHART

November 29, 2007

TRENTON, ONT. -- Research Casting International looks like an ordinary industrial building until you grab the door handle to enter.

It's a bone.

It sounds like an ordinary plant, too, its air replete with metallic clanks and Metallica cranked on a dust-covered stereo, as a forklift trundles through the dim expanse of racks, machines and more bones.

When you need something big assembled, any such shop will do. When that something is the skeleton of one of the largest dinosaurs to walk the Earth - like the one that spent 45 years forgotten in storage at the Royal Ontario Museum until it was found this fall - you bring it here.

Once it arrives, an ordinary guy named Peter May will look after you - though he'd appreciate it if you could hold off until Dec. 15.

That's the day the ROM plans to unveil its rediscovered treasure, parts of which Mr. May unwittingly handled when he worked at the museum decades ago; which he had a hand in finding again in September; and which his highly specialized company is now feverishly reassembling.

When they're done, Gordo the Barosaurus will be the biggest dinosaur ever displayed in Canada and the only mounted Barosaurus in the world built with actual fossils, rather than mere castings.

For the moment, Gordo remains a little disjointed, his parts scattered about the 4,400-square-metre RCI plant as Mr. May calmly directs the biggest rush job of his 30-year career.

"We should be calling Guinness on this one," says the burly, soft-spoken 52-year-old, who grew up in working-class Hamilton and studied fine arts (sculpture) in university.

A specimen of Gordo's size and complexity would normally take two or three workers two years to prepare and assemble. For this job, Mr. May was given 6½ weeks, so he's had to push everything else aside and throw 15 experienced technicians at it.

"We haven't pulled a weekend yet, but that'll be coming," says the man whose handiwork greets museum-goers from Sydney to Berlin to Tokyo to Riyadh, and dozens of major centres in between. That includes New York's American Museum of Natural History, where the world's only other mounted Barosaurus - a casting, that is - rears up to protect its young from a meat-eating Allosaurus.

All of which explains why the ROM called on Mr. May and his team to remount its dinosaur displays in the museum's new Michael Lee-Chin Crystal, incorporating pieces that will be both familiar and new to visitors.

Last spring, after the ROM hired David Evans, a 27-year-old fresh out of graduate school, to lead dinosaur research, he was instructed to fill the last and largest gap in the collection - a Brontosaurus-like sauropod from the Jurassic period, which the old museum had always lacked the space to mount.

No one realized that just such a specimen had been hiding in plain view inside the ROM's vaults since 1962.

Dr. Evans made the discovery - with help from Mr. May, who was seated beside him - as they flew to a dig site in Wyoming on Sept. 27 to size up a Diplodocus, close relative to the Barosaurus, as a candidate for display.

As the plane climbed over Michigan, Mr. May handed Dr. Evans a 2005 article by a noted sauropod expert, Jack McIntosh, which gave a detailed history of Barosaurus discoveries in the United States.

Five pages in, Dr. Evans unearthed a verbal artifact that soon had him sitting bolt upright: "These elongate cervicals (CM 1198) probably belong to a partial skeleton, field #155 (now ROM 3670), which was originally identified as Diplodocus."

"I leaned over and hit [Mr. May] on the shoulder and said, 'Look at this,' " Dr. Evans says. "I wanted to turn the plane around."

Arcane to anyone else, the reference suggested that the random, disparate sauropod bones he'd noticed on shelves and in drawers in the ROM collections room actually belonged to a single dinosaur, and a Barosaurus, no less - a vegan behemoth rarer and larger than Diplodocus, measuring 24 metres long and weighing in at 15 tonnes when it roamed North America.

When the plane touched down in Denver, Dr. Evans fired off e-mails to colleagues in Toronto and to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, to which Dr. McIntosh had referred in his paper as the probable holder of those "elongate cervicals," or neck vertebrae, belonging to the ROM specimen.

After two days that felt like two weeks, Dr. Evans and Mr. May returned to Toronto.

"As soon as I got back, I made a beeline for the collection and started realizing what looked like a bunch of random fragments actually fit together," Dr. Evans says, pointing out the shelves and drawers where he found the pieces. "Because I knew what I was looking for, things started fitting together."

Meanwhile, ROM collections manager Kevin Seymour recalled having seen a letter from Dr. McIntosh to Gordon Edmund, the late ROM curator who retired in 1990, regarding the Barosaurus, and searched for several hours until he found it.

The letter, dated Sept. 21, 1980, gave a detailed list of the pieces Dr. McIntosh had noted during previous visits to the ROM, and further digging revealed the Barosaurus bones - originally thought to be Diplodocus - had been obtained in a 1962 trade with the Carnegie Museum, in exchange for two duck-billed dinosaurs. Additionally, a mix-up at the Pittsburgh end at the time resulted in several of the metre-long neckbones staying behind.

"That letter was basically the Rosetta stone to figuring the whole thing out," Dr. Evans says, adding that there's nothing particularly unusual about a museum as old and large as the ROM losing track of parts of its collection through several decades and building renovations. Dr. Edmund, for whom Gordo was named, had hoped to mount the big sauropod but lacked the space, and when his career ended, its story simply got lost.

Strangely enough, Mr. May was a young ROM employee in the late 1970s, and had yet to start his casting business, when he helped pack the contents of the collections room for one of those moves within the building.

When Gordo arrived in Trenton, a piece of him came in a cardboard box that Mr. May recognized as having packed himself, in 1979, using then-newfangled protective foam sprayed from a can.

That was four years before the birth of Mr. May's daughter, Amelia, who now works for RCI and drew the formidable duty of laying out Gordo's bone fragments to see what goes where.

"It's frustrating at times, because you have a million little pieces," the 24-year-old Ms. May says during a break from removing caked-on rock from one of the Barosaur's bones. "You look for the colour and the texture and you get to know your pieces really well after a while."

Daunting as it is, especially under such a tight deadline, the work is rewarding.

"When you expose a bone, you're like, 'Omigod, I'm the first person to ever see this,' " she says, adding that Gordo is 150 million years old, give or take. "You get to know the dinosaur; you think about its life and what happened to it, how it died. You become friends with it."

Dinosaur debut

Gordo the Barosaurus will make his public debut on Dec. 15, when the Royal Ontario Museum opens the James and Louise Temerty Galleries of the Age of Dinosaurs on the second level of the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal.

It will stretch out along the building's Bloor Street side, and be visible from the street through the Crystal's oblique windows.
 
I'm assuming Gordo will already be on display on December 14th for the member's preview. This is the gallery I've been waiting for!
 
I hope they don't just plunk it in the middle of a room. The Barosaurus at the MET in New York has a sort of 'interactive' podium where one can get underneath and really experience the specimen. The only thing is that the New York one is cast not fossil.

Heres a pic to help the visual learners (of which I am part) out...

amnh_baro_full_1.jpg
 
Oh its just sooo damn cool...especially when you notice that there is some sort of predatory dinosaur (I'm sorry, I'm not sure which one - looks like some sort of Raptor thing...) that seems to be attacking it....

Marvelous!
 
the ceilings in the dino gallery aren't quite as high as the one at the Museum of Natural History in New York. I believe that it is the textiles gallery which will have the highest ceiling. Not good planning if you ask me... why would textiles require such vaulted ceilings?

Since we're on the topic of New York's museum, can we please have the Hayden planetarium? Pleeeeeeeease?
 
Funny, but this is how I feel about the Distillery District (plopping in tall glass condos into a Victorian gentified industrial district and ignoring the context), but I don't feel this about the ROM, which I think has worked well, despite some issues with some of the details. And I like the L Tower. I guess it really about people's own opinions.

At the end of the day it is all about personal preference, but I do feel that the new buildings of the DD do reference their context with the same panache, and thereby with the same respect, as the ROM Crystal. US has explained why this is so in many posts, and I tend to agree with him. It has also been mentioned several times here about how a juxtaposition of the old with the new seems to be a signature style of Toronto, both the ROM and the DD are good examples of this approach. The key to this approach, imo, and the reason why the L Tower doesn't work, is that both the old and new must have equal impact in their contribution to the overall aesthetic, and one cannot overpower the other. So for example, although the new DD buildings are taller, the street-level experience of the DD is still strongly about the red-brick Victorians, with the newer buildings playing into this with their podiums. The L Tower on the other hand truly feels intrusive, with its boot-like base literally stomping onto the roof of the O'Keefe. The style of the L feels wrong here too. Too showy and modern for its shared context with the O'Keefe which truly should be the recognized star of the site. As such, I think this is one specific site where a typical tasteful, polite and simple Toronto tower would have worked better. If anything, a flourish at the crown would have sufficed to reference the O'Keefe and add a little flair. Of course, my opinion only.
 
My thoughts exactly, Tewder. The "dialogue" between the Libeskind and the Dickinson feels more like a bratty kid shouting at a parent than two equals discussing things calmly and arriving at interesting new conclusions about life.

Meanwhile, back to the ROM:

The second floor Dinosaur/Mammals galleries are taller than the third floor galleries, and the fourth floor Textiles and Costumes gallery has a high ceiling because it is on the top floor of the Crystal.

The high ceilings of the second floor galleries have necessitated steps down at third floor level to get from the Crystal to the Themes and Collections gallery near the Eaton Court in the east wing.
 
Since we're on the topic of New York's museum, can we please have the Hayden planetarium? Pleeeeeeeease?

There's been a group called GeoSpace that has been pushing for a new planetarium on the Waterfront for quite some time now.
 
^ ya, Thorsell said it would age and even out but I don't see that happening at all. If anything, the differences seem to be getting more drastic.

The good thing about this is that its such an obvious mistake and shortcoming that it will be a good candidate for replacement in short order. I have no doubt Thorsell and co. are thinking about it right now while in public they put on a happy face.
 

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