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

Everyone scribbles on napkins. Gehry's AGO has a scribble, Diamond's FSCPA has a scribble, I expect the Gardiner had a scribble. The design competition for the ROM was juried, not a cage match; Libeskind didn't pin anyone to the floor and rip their head off to get the commission. There has always been talk of the fix being in for him to get the job, despite it being a juried decision. The AGO's equally strong civic story is Ken Thomson's unprecedented donation of art and endowment funding, his partnership with the equally ancient Gehry, Gehry's return to the city where he lived to design something major, and Thomson's death before he saw the building completed. The opera house isn't a reno - unlike the other two projects - so the civic story is the creation of a brand new cultural facility on a par with any opera house anywhere in the world.
 
What about the CN Tower or Skydome? Both brought the city together, and both became icons as well. This unlike the Four Seasons is a landmark for our city to ad to our short but ever growing list.
 
Roy Thomson Hall, when it opened, was a semi-biggie in an age when hoi polloi weren't swept up in celebrating the arrival of brand new buildings that many of them would never actually use. It was a civic landmark then, though the vision of the architect swept aside the importance of good acoustics, and even after expensive renovations a few years ago it will never be considered a "landmark" great symphony hall. Nor, acoustically speaking, is the Sydney opera house a landmark - ours has them beat hands down and for operagoers it is a landmark of acoustical excellence.

Thankfully, everyone and their brother now acts as if they have a personal stake in the development of our civic spaces and institutions such as the ROM, and I think this sense of engagement is long overdue. Thorsell writes in the new ROM magazine about how neutral ( Modernist, I guess ) buildings have fallen out of favour and buildings that express the individual artistic vision of the person who designed them have come to the fore. Hence starchitecture. This too shall pass, of course, as the scene evolves.
 
The big 3 cultural projects are all equally notable for slightly different reasons. Now, can't we all get along? (Personally, I think the AGO is going to come out the best, but that's just my opinion.)
 
It'll have great views to the south and north.

There was an article in yesterday's Post that quotes senior project manager Mike Mahoney as saying of the Dundas Street facade, "Somebody in Galleria Italia will be able to look at the city. Similarly, the people on the street can look into the structure. There's a dialogue." The City Room works in much the same way.
 
I can't attend on Saturday evening nor can I pick up tickets during the day as I'll be working... I'm a member though. Does that grant me access to the museum or do I still have to pick up a ticket in order to visit on Sunday?

Alternatively, will I be able to see the Crystal during the week with my member pass?
 
From what I read on the ROM website, admission to the Architectural Opening on Sunday will be by timed tickets only, perhaps for safety and/or or fire regulation reasons.

The preview next week, on the other hand, is free with regular ROM admission, so your member pass should let you get into the preview.

*****

I'm thinking about going to the ROM early tomorrow to get tickets for the opening. Anybody else going? How early will you be there to get in line for the tickets?
 
I'm shivering with anticipation.

Too bad I'm not living in TO these days. I only have a few free hours in the city on Tues and Thurs and I'd have a hard time paying full admission just so I can visit the Crystal but not have enough time to explore the entire collection.

I'm looking forward to seeing everyone's interor photos, but I just know that this is a building whose essence cannot be captured through the lens of a camera.
 
Lisa Rochon from the Globe just savaged it:

Crystal scatters no light

LISA ROCHON
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
June 2, 2007 at 12:15 AM EDT

It's hard, aggressive and in your face. It cantilevers dangerously over the street, shifting the ground from under our feet. Do not expect shelter from the $135-million Michael Lee-Chin crystalline addition to Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum by Daniel Libeskind. Expect the exaltation of one architect, one man, one individual. Expect the stuff of Libeskind: an exile, a brilliant thinker, a marketer with a silver tongue.

Come into this person's life, see their triumphs, feel their sorrow — such is the nature of the prurient and morbid explorations of the 21st-century individual. Oprah, Jerry Springer, Dr. Phil, they cannot begin to satisfy our ambition to know, our desire to be exposed. This is my space. Read my Facebook. Here we go again with the exaltation of the individual, except this time a guy decides to assault the street with his architecture.

Okay, everybody: Let's try to understand it.

First of all, a city as large and complex as Toronto has room for this kind of audacious experiment. There is architectural delirium at the reinvented ROM. And ecstasy, too.

The Stair of Wonders is a disarming composition of folded planes best appreciated when viewed from below, looking up several storeys through its core.

For this, ROM CEO William Thorsell, a passionate defender of architecture and public space who insisted that something fantastic occur in an ancillary circulation space, can be thanked as much as Libeskind, designer of the entire museum expansion in a joint venture with Bregman + Hamann Architects of Toronto. Also because of Thorsell, the public square on Bloor Street has been cleared of the city's usual portfolio of junk. Now minimalist lighting standards by Montreal's Éclairage Public will eventually grace the front of the museum. The Crystal Five (C5) restaurant, produced by local hipsters II X IV Design Associates within the penthouse of Libeskind's sharply angled envelope, offers an exhilarating station from which to view Toronto's magnificence as well as its sophomoric disorder. In the future, another of Thorsell's laudable ambitions — green roofs — will be added to the ROM's new topography.

Mostly, though, the new ROM rages at the world. This rage I cannot pretend to understand. But, it surely has something to do with losing 85 of your relatives during the Holocaust, of playing the accordion not the piano because of what the neighbours in Lodz, Poland, might say, of scribbling mad, inspired drawings in relative isolation at Michigan's Cranbrook Academy of Art, of only knowing the pleasure of building at the age of 52. Libeskind speaks often of all of this. His architecture is his Facebook.

You already know how the building bullies its way past the genteel east and west wings built in the early 20th century when craft, scale and permanence were pre-eminent in the minds of client and architect.

Whereas the 1912-14 museum by Darling & Pearson responded to the delights of neighbouring Philosopher's Walk with a tapestry of buff brick corbels and arched windows, Libeskind offers the angled face of the most desolate outcrop and matches the dog's breakfast aesthetic of commerce across Bloor with an exterior cladding of grey, anodized aluminum. Thorsell tells me the tone of the grey was chosen for its slightly warm hue, but all I can see is the colour of something dissonant, the colour, say, of Elektra's humiliation in Richard Strauss's opera.

There is more angst on the inside where windows cut like jagged scars across gallery walls, where steel grating makes for an uneasy, noisy floor on the many catwalks. The main lobby is an oppressive gesture, made especially heavy-handed by a ski slope of uneven drywall. There are mean views through the courtyard to the historic brick elevation and the access to the Samuel Hall/Currelly Gallery, restored as part of the $240-million in construction costs spent on Renaissance ROM.

The Royal Ontario Museum, like many museums of civilization around the globe, offers collections dedicated to the great artistic triumphs of the world as well as the evolutionary complexity of nature. So, why does it feel as though we've landed in the Inferno or possibly the Purgatorio of Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy? How strange to gather up friends or family to see the bats or the art-deco furniture at the beloved ROM, or the moody seascapes of Hiroshi Sugimoto, whose work is currently on exhibition at the Institute for Contemporary Culture on the fourth floor of the Crystal, and to be thrust into an aesthetic defined by a lack of decorative grace or warmth, where walls are always painted white and there's poured epoxy on the floors because terrazzo was too expensive. What did we do wrong? Unpaid parking tickets? Not enough organic greens in today's lunch? The wrecking of the environment? War? It's hard to know why we're treated to exposed screw heads on thin drywall.

Had it been clad in glass with the cacophony of steel beams exposed to the public, the museum would clearly represent an astonishing triumph. (Vanbots Construction managed the overall construction, with Halsall as the structural engineer and Walters Inc. of Hamilton performing the ironwork installation.) Approximately 3,000 steel members set at wide and subtle angles comprise the difficult structure of the Lee-Chin Crystal. But glass is an expensive and unreliable cladding to use as a roof in any Canadian city. And steel beams are not absolutely fire-resistant. None of this was fully appreciated when Libeskind submitted 11 drawings on ROM napkins of a glass, crystalline addition for the invited design competition. The ROM considered painting the beams in tumescent paint (which swells slightly to form a layer of insulation), says Thorsell, during our luxurious tour of the new museum this week. But the cost was prohibitive. Instead, the spray-on fire-proofing material is so thick and pasty as to render the beams unrecognizable.

That's why the decision was made to cover up the greatest engineering feat this country has seen in the last 30 years. It's an unfortunate lie.

With Libeskind, the building is the most important artifact. He first rendered this idea in his remarkable and deeply troubling Jewish Museum Berlin (1998-2001), which opened without any exhibitions. I can't think of another building that operates so profoundly as an open sore. The building's plan is a three-dimensional Star of David, scored like the ROM's with slotted windows. In Berlin, it was entirely appropriate that Libeskind used a circuitous route called die Leere, or "the emptiness." But, I'm not convinced that a language of loss is one that should be replicated from city to city, from London's Victoria & Albert Museum — that Libeskind project of jagged forms was cancelled in 2004 after much public outcry — to the Denver Art Gallery to Toronto.

At the ROM, the Spirit House is an ill-fated attempt to impose "the emptiness" of the Jewish Museum in Berlin within this museum. Perhaps when the lights are dimmed, it will force some introspection on all of us, but when I visited the Spirit House — a vertical space of gallery-linking bridges that extends from the top to the bottom of the Crystal — it seemed like a jangly, self-conscious void.

The complexity of the Crystal's construction has delayed the project by 18 months from the original projection. Today, the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal opens with exhibitions in the below-grade Garfield Weston Exhibition Hall and in the new Institute for Contemporary Culture. The five other new galleries contained within the Crystal are minus exhibitions. But the museum as Libeskind's personal playhouse continues to amaze. A new chandelier designed by Libeskind and embedded with Swarovski crystals is to be installed over the monumental staircase leading to the upper restaurant. The only objects on display within the core of the Crystal are stainless-steel split-cuboid chairs designed by Libeskind and made by the Toronto-based furniture manufacturer Nienkamper. You'll find them on the ground floor at the base of the Spirit House and, naturally, in the new ROM Museum Store.

Let's see now. About 12 years after it was built, the Art Gallery of Ontario's addition by Barton Myers with Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blumberg (1992) was removed in order to make way for the current iteration designed by Frank Gehry. In 2003, the Terrace Gallery addition to the ROM by Moffat Kinoshita with Mathers & Haldenby (1978-83) was demolished just 20 years after its construction. Before the ironworkers set to work on the site, the courtyard, emptied of all architectural pretension, was a beautiful void.

Given the money, the determination and the generosity of the private sector in Toronto, the big institutions in this town will continue to be the subject of dramatic reconfigurations every two or three decades. That's why style exists — so that it can be sneered at from a safe distance and then reworked according to the latest fashion.

In another while, I imagine something very different for the ROM: the anodized aluminum and drywall ripped clean from its steel structure, the public blissfully liberated with every whack at the tin pinata. Decades from now, with 100,000 people annually migrating to the Toronto region, I suspect public space will finally be valued as a precious commodity. Desperate to reclaim that perfect quadrangle between the original east and west wings of the museum, the ROM will have expanded several storeys underground. It won't be that difficult to take down the Libeskind addition; its foundation is completely separate from the historic one and its walls barely touch the originals. What I see are hanging gardens draped over the raw steel beams. Natural light flooding the underground galleries. A Babylon for the 21st century.

Watch for this in the future, when the personal angst of an architect will be less indulged.

The Michael Lee-Chin Crystal wing will be officially opened tonight by Governor-General Michaëlle Jean and celebrated with a number of free public events, including a concert. (www.rom.on.ca/crystal/celebrate.php).
_______________________________________________

Just what is exactly wrong with having a little bit of Berlin (or Barcelona) in our design style? Besides that, having to drag the Holocaust into this is just lowball. I've expected more from Rochon to than such gross comments, but clearly that was a mistake.

But of course, we're treated to Rochon's fetish for muscular architecture (and men) in a previous Globe article.

AoD
 
I think she nails it. The design is slapped on and inappropriate. It will, however, draw crowds until the novelty wears off
 
Lisa Rochon = Complete Asshat

She really has completely missed the point of this wonderful structure...

"rages at the world"???? I detect no rage here, in fact I would say it delights in its outrageousness....the ROM crystal is, hands down, the best we have gotten here in T.O., perhaps ever, imo...sometimes I think the so-called newspaper 'experts' spend all their time thinking of something clever to say, but behind it all, they are as empty and worthless as the most uninformed streetcorner hack.
 
here's a little counterpoint to the moronic Lisa Rochon.....

Elite shine at Crystal fundraiser
TheStar.com - entertainment - Elite shine at Crystal fundraiser

ROM celebration draws cultural rich and famous, but it's tonight's party that will really make a statement

June 02, 2007
Martin Knelman
entertainment columnist

The Royal Ontario Museum marched into the new century last night with one of the bubbliest gala fundraisers in the history of the Toronto arts world, celebrating the opening of the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal.

No doubt the $1,000-a-head price tag, the rich-and-famous names on the guest list, and the tantalizing menu were all part of the mix. But there was something with more resonance that made it special.

For the first time in its history, the ROM has become downright lovable.

In the end, what people will remember decades from now is the transformative impact on the entire city of architect Daniel Libeskind's iconic building, which virtually shouts: "Stop thinking of museums as stuffy, austere places! This place is for everyone, not just the elite, and the adventure beings even before you step inside, when just the shape of it tells you something exciting is about to happen."

Among the 500 guests at the sold-out dinner: Libeskind and his wife, Nina; $30 million lead donor Michael Lee-Chin and his parents, Gloria and Vincent Chen; campaign chair Hilary Weston and her family; finance minister Jim Flaherty; Mila and Brian Mulroney; Peter and Melanie Munk; Ivan Fecan and Sandra Faire; Murray Frum and Nancy Lockhart; Wallace McCain and Margaret Norrie McCain; Ontario culture minister Caroline Di Cocco.

The evening began outside the new main entrance on Bloor St. and flowed through the Spirit House lobby into the four-storey Hyacinth Gloria Chen Crystal Court.

Some women flew to Paris to buy couture dresses for the special event, while one guest reportedly paid as high as $2 million for a table of nine in the dining room, reports the Star's Rita Daly.

"Toronto has all the ingredients to be a great city, it already is," accomplished architect Bruce Kuwabara said as he walked up the red carpet, adding the Crystal has people all over the world talking about it.

"If Toronto wants to grow up ... it has to get comfortable with debate."

After dinner, an additional 500 guests arrived for a night of exploring and dancing at the Big Bang Party ($250 per person), which was to go on until 3 a.m.

While last night was a big-deal occasion for the privileged members of Toronto's social and cultural elite, the true significance of the Crystal will shine even more brightly tonight, when thousands of ordinary people gather on Bloor St. for a free concert in collaboration with Luminato that begins at dusk.

After the concert, crowds will be welcomed through the doors of the Crystal, accepting the museum's invitation to stay all night and explore its wonders.

That speaks to an anything-goes spirit of inclusiveness, diversity and democracy that Libeskind's witty and surprising shapes and angles celebrate. It announces an end to the old Toronto, where museums belonged principally to members of the establishment club.

Michael Lee-Chin likes to tell the story of the day Mrs. Weston came to Burlington to say she wanted him to write that $30 million cheque.

He asked her why she went to the trouble of going all the way to Burlington when she could have looked across the breakfast table and asked her billionaire husband to take care of it.

"Well," said Mrs. Weston, "if Galen wrote the cheque, it wouldn't cause a ripple. But if you do it, it will be an inspiration to every immigrant."

Mrs. Weston, of course, was absolutely right.

Yes, the elite had their special night last night. But now it's time for the rest of the city to start the real party, which will go on for decades, making sure that Toronto will never be the same.
 
Whether you agree with Rochon's assessment or not, she ain't no moron and I don't think her Holocaust comment was inappropriate. I generally like the ROM addition but it's not as spectacular as I expected it to be which mostly has to do with the less than ideal cladding. The interior looks more impressive. I think criticism of it is fair game.
 

Back
Top