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

Frank Godfrey said:
Maybe we should regard the Crystal as the flamboyantly flawed entrance to a generally thoughtful ROM galleries' re-alignment, and just leave it at that, for now. In time, and when there is money enough, refinements will have to be considered for the addition. On the bright side, even the hostile reviews of the Crystal addition we see on those " worst " lists carry some positives. It may be negative, but it's advertising nonetheless.
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I like your thoughts.

Having been away from here for over two weeks, I decided to drive around Toronto today and take a fresh look (this is a change, I usually walk). Some observations:

First, this past decade has given Toronto a very dynamic new appearance, and it is an appearance that I like. This city looks unmistakably big now, and the city is quite attractive despite some warts that get referenced in other threads. There is depth to Toronto's new look because of the way old and new are worked into the equation.

Second, the city seems to be able to absorb things like ROM's crystal. While I don't like Crystal very much (it reads angst, and smacks of the sixties) I will not deny that the exterior makes a statement. Controversy and debate are welcome things.

I wish the various news reports would talk about Toronto's enormous artistic expansion rather than focus on the one flawed project. I also wish that 300 million could have secured a totally revamped ROM (i.e. to have addressed the work at the south end, for cohesiveness). There is apparently more work to be done therefore more money to be raised. Good luck to them, given all of this bad publicity.

One last thing, way off topic but what the hell: I was in the U.S. for two weeks. I heard so many Americans say "I love Toronto". Screw what Canadians think.
 
I agree about depth - the ROM and AGO renovations make them considerably more substantial visits. The AGO, in particular, feels like it has finally become the place it was destined to be. In the ROM's case - with more renovated galleries to come - we're seeing objects displayed that haven't been on show in a generation, and others that have never been out of storage. And there's a logic ( natural world: second floor / cultural galleries: first and third floors ) to how it's displayed, including the aforementioned pedestrian flow, that wasn't there before - so let's not lose sight of what the Crystal replaced, and why. The ROM's renovation is complex in terms of the sheer numbers of artifacts involved: the AGO has about 4,500 items out, but the ROM has almost that number in the Chinese suite of galleries alone.

There are similar issues of depth with the expanded Conservatory, Ballet School and OCAD buildings - namely, more students. Lightbox will give us an entirely new cultural centre, drawing several existing bodies together under one roof and augmenting them with galleries and screening rooms. If the U of T Art Centre joins the expanded Gardiner Museum at Bloor and Avenue Road it'll add another level to that cultural node. Qualitatively, the opera/ballet house enhances our global reputation as a cultural centre - as does Luminato. For anyone involved with the arts scene it is a great time for this city.
 
The Washington Post calls the ROM Crystal "the worst piece of architecture erected in the last decade." Not very flattering, but wrong. At least it continues to be discussed and in the process made even more famous.

The worst

The Michael Lee-Chin Crystal. Sure, there were a lot of Wal-Marts thrown up in the Aughts, but Daniel Libeskind's addition to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto surpasses the ugliness of bland functional buildings by being both ugly and useless. His aluminum-and-glass-clad crystalline forms grow out of the building's original 1914 structure, and from the street it's dramatic. But go inside and you need a map to move around its irrational and baffling dead spaces.

And where do you put art in a room of canted walls? Curators seem as baffled and frustrated by it as casual visitors. And it cost only $250 million.

Source
 
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dt_toronto_geek said:
And where do you put art in a room of canted walls?
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Apparently, nobody from the Post bothered to visit the Crystal to see how they've done it - in the Africa, the Americas and Asia-Pacific galleries on the third floor for instance. One suspects that the writer is confusing the ROM, where most of the items are three dimensional objects displayed in the round - in the heritage wings as well as the Crystal - with the Denver Art Museum, where installation has posed problems. But even then, as Siamak Hariri's iceberg-like display walls in the Institute for Contemporary Culture show, Libeskind's design can be enhanced in a way that's both practical for exhibiting flat art and sympathetic to the building.
 
dt_toronto_geek said:
The Washington Post calls the ROM Crystal "the worst piece of architecture erected in the last decade." Not very flattering, but wrong. At least it continues to be discussed and in the process made even more famous.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/24/AR2009122400116.html
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It's interesting how the lead photo on CityTV's site is the Crystal under construction, making the exterior look messier and worse because all the cladding hasn't been installed yet.
 
dt_toronto_geek said:
The Washington Post calls the ROM Crystal "the worst piece of architecture erected in the last decade."

The worst

The Michael Lee-Chin Crystal. Sure, there were a lot of Wal-Marts thrown up in the Aughts, but Daniel Libeskind's addition to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto surpasses the ugliness of bland functional buildings by being both ugly and useless. His aluminum-and-glass-clad crystalline forms grow out of the building's original 1914 structure, and from the street it's dramatic. But go inside and you need a map to move around its irrational and baffling dead spaces.

And where do you put art in a room of canted walls? Curators seem as baffled and frustrated by it as casual visitors. And it cost only $250 million.

Source
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We may be saved, depending on how we define the decade's architecture - completed works or works started.

A "worst piece of" case could probably be made for the Canadian pavilion at the Shanghai Expo 2010. Surely a mediocre building "inspired by" Libeskind is worse than an original Libeskind.

In any case, Toronto has a controversial contemporary building and that is not a bad thing.



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I'm not sure if it's inspired by Libeskind so much as by Expo 67's tetrahedral fetish...
 
Well the ROM is simply a replication (without any second thought) of all of Libeskind's other work. Hardly creative. Toronto deserves better.

I'm glad Bloor got a stunning building. But a shocking design OTHER than this one would have been nice.
 
We're getting a handful of hunky terra cotta warriors to ogle this summer. It'll make up for all those terribly important but aesthetically dull little scrolly things at the bottom of dimly-lit display cases from last year. I do wish they'd get on with the new galleries, though - 20th Century design in particular.
 
Spire:

Well the ROM is simply a replication (without any second thought) of all of Libeskind's other work. Hardly creative. Toronto deserves better.
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How did you come to such a judgement? Are you even familiar with all of Libeskind's other works? How is, for example, SF Jewish Museum a replication of the ROM? Or Berlin Jewish Museum, for that matter?

AoD
 
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adma said:
I'm not sure if it's inspired by Libeskind so much as by Expo 67's tetrahedral fetish...
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Other than the Bucky dome, where else did we have the dreaded tetrahedon in Montreal?

I really hope that young architects, or even old ones, are not reaching back to the 60s for their design inspiration.

To make matters worse, the design of the Canadian pavilion at EXPO2010 is being attributed to Le Cirque de Soleil - maybe it is inspired by Montreal of half a century ago.




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I stand corrected and should have done my googling before the fact rather than after. Indeed the truncated tetrahedron was one of the defining features of EXPO67 and not in the US dome.

That having been said, is this the image we want to show the world in 2010? Maybe it is.



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