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

I went to the ROM for the second time this week and got to see it inside in daylight.

I can see some things are already being fixed.

- The blast doors into the Stair of Wonders are being prepped for painting. I hope they make it an inviting colour like ROM red or ROM yellow... ok, forget the yellow.. ROM red is good.
Not sure if that will help alleviate the sense of "unwelcomeness" that those doors evoke.

- The outdoor music venue facing Philosopher's walk has had lots of work done on it since the Crystal opening.

- Barriers such as wires and plexiglass are already being put in places where there was an obvious litigation trap. An example are the cutouts overlooking the Court were inviting to climb on to but had no barriers preventing people from falling several stories down into the court.

Other issues are already showing up, only a week into the opening:

- The grates on the bridges are shifting and now make metallic growling noises when people walk on them.

- Seeing the state of the walls now leads me to believe that the ROM should by interests in a paint company... They're going to be repainting those walls on at least a weekly basis.

Other issues:
Members aren't being treated as such. I pay an annual committment to the ROM, yet they ask me to fork over $4 bucks for an audio tour? Common! Also, the previous members lounge is now gone. Members don't have any space exclusive to them. I know this isn't my home, but it would be nice to have a place where members could gather, perhaps have access to a kitchenette for making coffee/tea and relaxing a bit during their visit.
 
Other issues:
Members aren't being treated as such. I pay an annual committment to the ROM, yet they ask me to fork over $4 bucks for an audio tour? Common! Also, the previous members lounge is now gone. Members don't have any space exclusive to them. I know this isn't my home, but it would be nice to have a place where members could gather, perhaps have access to a kitchenette for making coffee/tea and relaxing a bit during their visit.


I could see a members lounge, but being able to make your own coffee/tea is not something I could envision. If anything I'd see them putting in a cafe with member discounted pricing.
 
The grates on the bridges are shifting and now make metallic growling noises when people walk on them.

I was there on opening night and a couple of women in front of me were walking across the grates when suddenly a corner of a grate popped up and caused one of the women to stumble.
 
I think Thorsell made a wrong decision in allowing the Crystal to open unready.

The public is getting the wrong impression about the building while they can go in for free which will perhaps prevent them from coming in paid in the future.

I noticed several people commenting on the anodized aluminum siding not matching up at the seams, being scratched and looking painfully temporary (although they are not).
 
Ouch, "looking painfully temporary" is not a good comment
 
Ok.. "feeling pinafully temporary"... I scuffed my hand while climbing the stair of wonders. ouch indeed.

By the way, I noticed on my second visit that workers had rounded some corners of those anodized aluminum sections.
 
I'm glad they're dealing with the death-traps. I know there's no such thing as bad publicity, but impaling someone on your new crystal must push the boundaries.

The inside aluminum siding is terrible; I absolutely thought it was temporary, or about to be covered. If it isn't, I wager it will be in the years to come. I'm pleased with the way the crystal looks and what it does for the cityscape - that's a kink that couldn't have worked out if it had failed. The inside problems can be mended over the years.
 
I went back today for the $5 Friday evening price and checked out a few more of the galleries. The Weston Gallery, of Japanese prints inspired by the underbelly of 17th and 18th century Edo (Tokyo) is really worth seeing (there's a few prints that border on the pornographic).

The Crystal is different during the day with the almost random sun coming in, and I think the structure and the basic interior is great. The grates are really getting noisy, and I hope that something is done to make them more interesting and permanent. A couple more coats of paint in places is also needed and other touches and improvement, like the blast doors that make what I think is a rather nice stairway otherwise, feel like an elaborate fire escape. The entrance plaza could be more elaborate, but all these things can be easily remedied. I would really like to wait until the re-opening.

I also think I saw Chris Hume wandering around.
 
I don't understand why they are using rivets/screws to hold the metal sheets into place in the stairwells. Couldn't some kind of adhesive been used to hold those in place instead of these fasteners? I do like the smooth feel of the metal surfaces, but the visual feel to me looks like drywall that has not yet been painted. Perhaps this is the raw look the designer wants?
 
I like the look of the freestanding fire-hose case: it'll echo the look of the freestanding display cases. I don't think the Crystal will have the same installation problems that Denver had since few of the ROM's exhibits are flat, graphic works that require flat wall space. The recently renovated Asian and Canadian Indian galleries on the main floor have mostly freestanding displays as well, which gives coherence to the museum as a whole.
 
^^ I noticed some areas of the Crystal have built in fire-hose cabinets. It seems that the freestanding ones were an after construction requirement.
 
My girlfriend was very pleased to find the freestanding fire hose cabinet; I have a picture of her posing with it. "Look!" she said. "The only right angles in the entire building!"
 
Its probably true that Thorsell conciously cheaped out on internal materials that will be completely and easily replaced when eventually another benefactor appears. Give it time, Rome wasn't built in a day. I would imagine that taking one gallery and ripping out the wall covering and flooring and replacing it would be a fast process, best post-poned until a point in time when we have a surplus of construction workers rather than a shortage.
 
nice article from today's New York Sun....

Libeskind's Toronto TriumphArchitecture
BY ROBERT HILFERTY
June 12, 2007
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/56373


TORONTO — The new kid on the international arts festival block is Toronto's Luminato, which opened for its first crowded weekend on June 1. An expertly programmed kaleidoscope of events, installations, and performances, the festival takes advantage of the city's best theaters and sites. Eager to be taken seriously, Luminato presented several world premieres by big-brand names, several of which will travel to the New York area. Philip Glass collaborated with Canadian poet Leonard Cohen, and their melancholic "Book of Longing" comes to the Lincoln Center Festival in July. The "Spamalot" team of Eric Idle and John du Prez created "Not the Messiah" — a comic oratorio inspired by "Monty Python's Life of Brian" — which makes a stop at Caramoor on July 1.

But of all the impressive performances in Luminato's opening weekend, the most masterful and satisfying one was by a building. The structure is the new expansion of the Royal Ontario Museum, which houses Canada's most important collection of natural and cultural artifacts. Named the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal, it is a singular sensation. This multifaceted jumble of prismatic forms surges upward toward the street at a steep angle and appears to be gashing into the museum's surrounding older buildings. Its shiny surface of aluminum cladding is zigzagged with a dynamic composition of narrow and wide glass windows. The building is named for its major donor, Jamaican Chinese billionaire Michael Lee-Chin, who made his fortune in mutual funds.

The "starchitect" responsible for this concoction is Daniel Libeskind, who scribbled his initial design on a napkin five years ago. Its opening was delayed by 18 months; it is the most complicated structure ever built in Canada and a feat of engineering ingenuity at a price tag of $135 million. It coincided with Luminato, which made the building's opening ceremonies feel like part of the festivities.

Indeed, this new building was celebrated with much hoopla, including a one-and-a-half hour concert on Bloor Street, Toronto's major thoroughfare, complete with a light show projected on the Crystal's façade and fireworks. After a private party inside, the building was open all night to the public, who waited in long lines during the day to get their time-slotted tickets.

Though the opening was coincidental to the start of the arts festival, the building has a dramatic performative element. It's a vivacious dance of interlocking crystal formations creating a new civic space in Toronto's urbanscape. I met with Mr. Libeskind before the opening to question him about this quality.

"I think a building is a performance," Mr. Libeskind said. "A building has to perform over a long range of time, to be sustained for many generations. It is a performance that has to be performing all the time and has to show itself to many different people at different times."

Mr. Libeskind, a former accordion virtuoso, goes even further with his musical metaphors: "The whole harmonic system that informs architecture — proportions, materials, light — is a musical construction. And, for me, architecture is not ‘frozen' music but a living dynamic experience."

The new Crystal, which adds 175,000 square feet of new exhibition and public space, predictably rattles some. Mr. Libeskind knows the price of that vertiginous virtuosity — just think of the fate of his similarly clamorous addition to London's Victoria and Albert Museum, eventually dumped.

It's not that Toronto is without its interesting architecture; it has Santiago Calatrava's white-ribbed BCE Place and Will Alsop's whimsical Sharp Centre for Design, a gigantic checkered box held up by colored pencils. But Bloor Street is a bore architecturally, with its lineup of dull, characterless boxes. The street definitely needed some shaking up.

"There will always be a tension when you do something new," Mr. Libeskind said. "That's what part of what architecture is all about: It is something that shouldn't put you to sleep. And the Crystal doesn't cut into the older buildings at all. The old structures and new structures are in conversation historically, that's one of the pleasures of walking through the museum."

What about the inside? Much criticism has been leveled at flashy buildings that seem inhospitable to the art or objects they're supposed to house. It's hard to make this determination just yet in this case, as most of the seven new white galleries are empty. But one of them is earmarked for dinosaurs and another for mammals, sculptural fossils that I think will sit well in the dynamic spaces when they are finally installed next spring. The same goes for the costume and textiles gallery, with its slashing windows.

Only the top-floor gallery is currently outfitted for an exhibit. Hiroshi Sugimoto's "History of History" is an elegant, if pretentiously titled, exhibition featuring exquisite Japanese objects, masks, and his own photographs of seascapes. The Japanese artist designed a curved wall that divides the space into two sections. It functions as a display case for his photographs on one side and Japanese scrolls on the other. It presented well and shows that Mr. Libeskind's irregular interiors are workable.

There is a contingent that argues that Mr. Libeskind is copying himself, particularly with his Jewish Museum in Berlin. Though there are some superficial similarities, which have to do with the architect's personal stamp, the buildings are utterly different in form, feeling, and historical context. One is about tragedy with hope; the Crystal is about celebration. And it's part of a cultural renaissance happening in Canada's biggest city. Frank Gehry's expansion of the Art Gallery of Toronto will open next year. And that energy translated to this project.

Another advantage in this project was that Libeskind did not have to juggle the emotional and political concerns that he faced as master planner of Ground Zero. "That was a difficult project and had all the emotions of tragedy, Mr. Libeskind said. "To bring concensus to that site, to get all the architects, developers, and politicians to work together, I had to make compromises. But I believe in those compromises."

Though it is rare to hear an architect sound so accepting of changes made to his designs, Mr. Libeskind was sincere. "Ground Zero is going to be a better site and beats the vision I presented in my master plan, absolutely."

As a master of creating and undertanding symbolic spaces, Mr. Libeskind managed to design structures of great importance in both Toronto and New York. "The Torontonians were bold, and never asked me to calm it down," Mr. Libeskind said. "They understood that they wanted to assert that the ROM is an important museum and wanted the boldness of that vision to be realized. It will become part of the city fabric, no doubt about it."
 

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