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

"It's only ambiguous if you choose to see it that way. Winter officially starts on December 21st and the weather really isn't that bad until then from January to the end of March."

The fact that I saw it that way proves that it is ambiguous. Winter may start on Dec. 21, but "the winter" starts as soon as the first snow falls.

I'll assume that by the time the crystal is ready for the final metal cladding, the interior will no longer be exposed to the elements and interior work can proceed, something MetroMan brought up later. In that case, it's perfectly reasonable to read the question "Weren't they supposed to start applying it before the winter?" as related to concerns about weather affecting the construction schedule rather than to worries about the ROM not hitting construction timeline markers and risking being accused of lateness by posters on an internet forum.
 
Will the seams of the panels of cladding be visible on the final skin? Or will it appear seamless?
 
Winter officially starts on December 21st

Astronomical winter, yes. That's the date of the Winter Solstice. Meterologicaly, winter is the period between December 1 - February 28.
 
I didn't know that Diamond+Schmitt were responsible for the new Varsity stadium..i hope it turns out alright!

Speaking of the ROM- my father was speaking with someone hire up the ranks regarding construction progress- not sure if this is old news by now, but the gentleman told him to expect more delays- especially regarding the facade-

Supposedly, the manufacturer in Germany, made the original fatia-panels too thin for our winters and they had to be re-jigged..Now this could be just words in the wind..no matter its coming along and that is what is important!

p5
 
The glass looks amazing. I especially like how the angle of the glass panels is not parallel with the overall window opening, making all sorts of interesting angles where the glass meets the border.
 
Does the Denver project have this sort of glasswork? Any recent pics?
 
Ganja, take a look at these photos of the Denver Art Museum

Oh my Gawd...

If we get anything near this, the ROM is going to be Toronto's new signature architecture piece. Worldwide response to OCAD will seem tepid after the ROM is completed.
 
Metro:

I think the interior of ROM will be similiar to DAM, except we'd have far more windows and an additional atrium courtyard. Even though they are using Titanium as exterior cladding, I have a feeling ours will look more impressive.

adma:

www.newyorker.com/critics...sk_skyline

AoD
 
I'd get lost in that Denver art museum. How can you possibly get your bearings there?
 
The Times is foul about the DAM as well, saying that the museum makes a neat crystal and a lousy exhibit space, and to hell with its urban context. (Though I guess that kind of IS what you expect when you order up a giant crystal.)

I'm going to paste it in here because it will disappear behind their paywall any day now. Ourousoff concludes:

Libeskind "is at work on more than two dozen residential and office towers in cities like Milan, Singapore, Toronto and Sacramento, Calif. Some of these clients are serious about producing quality architecture; others are probably in it for the Libeskind name."

*Awkward silence*

Article follows:

--

Architecture Review | 'Denver Art Museum'
A Razor-Sharp Profile Cuts Into a Mile-High Cityscape
By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF

DENVER — For those who admired Daniel Libeskind’s early work, his recent trajectory has been painful to watch. After soaring to stardom in 1999 with the evocative zigzagging form of his Jewish Museum in Berlin, he has suffered humiliation in his role as master planner at ground zero, not so much for his design as his consistent refusal to stand up for it. And his worst buildings, like a 2002 war museum in England suggesting the shards of a fractured globe, can seem like a caricature of his own aesthetic.

The new addition to the Denver Art Museum captures all of the contradictions within Mr. Libeskind’s oeuvre. Its bold, often mesmerizing forms reaffirm the originality of his talent, yet its tortured geometries make it a daunting place to install or view art — hardly a minor drawback. And for all its emotional power, the building seems eerily out of date, and its flaws readily apparent.

The centerpiece of the city’s new cultural district, the museum is composed as a series of interlocking rectangles evoking a pile of boxes tumbling across the site. The entrance faces a new plaza dotted with trees that links the Civic Center with the Golden Triangle, a neighborhood of once-dilapidated boarding houses that developers are transforming into a hip neighborhood for young urbanites.

The new plaza is a well-worn formula: museums, shops and a loftlike apartment complex, also designed by Mr. Libeskind, that are intended to manufacture an instantly vibrant street life. Civic leaders promise that it will help revitalize downtown Denver. (The museum opened on Oct. 7.)

Within this context the museum can be magical. In its most striking feature, a triangular form at one corner shoots out over a street toward the old Gio Ponti museum building. A bridge connects the two buildings just underneath. Other forms tumble out toward the plaza, partly sheltering the entrance. Yet the genius of the exterior lies in how its appearance changes when viewed from varying directions. Fragments of the cantilevered beak-like form can be gleaned between towering downtown buildings; from other angles the structure seems static and bunkerlike. At night the building tends to flatten out, giving it a strange stillness.

Mr. Libeskind pulls some of that energy right up through the building. Visitors enter the galleries by ascending a staircase that spirals up through a four-story atrium lobby. As you climb, the staircase gets tighter, more intimate. Slivers of daylight enter through slotlike skylights set where the walls intersect, so that at times the building looks as if it were pulling apart at the seams. Farther up, beams crisscross the space as if to prevent the walls from falling in on you.

The intersecting geometries yield the sort of wonderfully odd, leftover spaces typical of an attic, and Mr. Libeskind takes advantage of this by setting up small sitting areas within some of them.

Resting on a sofa, you may catch a glimpse of a silhouetted figure wandering up the staircase several levels above. At other times the experience can be like entering the jarring, riotous forms of an Expressionist canvas by Max Beckman.

Yet this is a place for viewing real works of art. And if criticizing contemporary architects for creating flamboyant museums that mistreat the art they house has become a tiresome pastime, it is overwhelmingly justified here. In a building of canted walls and asymmetrical rooms — tortured geometries generated purely by formal considerations — it is virtually impossible to enjoy the art.

The curators have made a valiant effort. Some of the sculpture, for example, looks terrific here. Antony Gormely’s 2000 “Quantum Cloud XXXIII,†an anonymous figure fashioned from stainless steel rods, seems to splinter off into space, as if the entire building were floating in pieces around it. But paintings by Degas and Pissarro look absolutely lost in the chaos of the surroundings. A row of Campbell’s soup can paintings by Warhol hangs on one side of a column, as if the curators had given up trying to find a suitable spot for them.

Just as disconcerting is how dated the building looks. Its titanium cladding, whether a respectful homage or a tired appropriation of the famous skin used for Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, looks oddly familiar. And more generally, it can remind you of Mr. Libeskind’s geometries in earlier projects: the boxlike tumbling forms of an unbuilt addition for the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the skewed cantilevered shapes of the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. It’s as if you’ve seen the same building again and again. And unlike, say, Mr. Gehry’s best work, the structures often seem shaped entirely by their own internal logic; their relation to their function and the buildings around them seems strained or artificial.

This problem may be related to the arc of Mr. Libeskind’s career. Many of his contemporaries spent the first phase of their professional lives in a desperate struggle to build, laboring night and day as unknowns, churning out design after design that went nowhere. But in the process they built up a storehouse of ideas they could draw on when they finally made a name for themselves and commissions began to pour in.

Mr. Libeskind spent the first decade or more of his career as an academic. By the time his Berlin museum was completed, he was 54 and had spent an entire decade pouring his heart into a single building that remains his greatest architectural achievement. His newfound celebrity resulted in a torrent of commissions, yet it seems as though he is struggling to expand on that earlier language, as if his stardom has not allowed him the time or space to explore new strains in his work.

The residential and retail complex he designed across the plaza from the museum looks like a cheap knockoff of his own building. Wrapping around two sides of a five-story parking structure, it lacks compositional rigor.

Oddly shaped forms are grafted onto the facades with no apparent rhyme or reason. A gridlike facade of crisscrossing mullions looks cheap and overwrought. And the interiors are blandly conventional except for the random positioning of some windows, which do make for some strange views.

You can’t help wondering what all this bodes for Mr. Libeskind’s future. He is building a German military history museum in Dresden and a performing arts center in Dublin; he is at work on more than two dozen residential and office towers in cities like Milan, Singapore, Toronto and Sacramento, Calif. Some of these clients are serious about producing quality architecture; others are probably in it for the Libeskind name.

But for any architect the proof is in the work, and Denver is a maddening bundle. At turns enchanting, predictable and irritating, it is uncompromising in all the wrong ways.
 
DaninToronto2: The Crystal will have an entrance atrium lobby that appears to be similar to the one in Denver. The idea is to make the structure of the building immediately apparent to people arriving so they can "get their bearings" and orient themselves to the galleries. There will be displays - such as the recently acquired Egyptian mummy board - placed at the entrance to these galleries.
 
On the issue of circulation and "getting lost" - fundamentally, the Libeskind addition basically works as the 2nd link between the Philosopher's Walk and Queen's Park wing, unlike the DAM, which is a standalone addition.

AoD
 

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