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From ROM News:

Elizabeth Samuel Garden

Rooftop garden celebrates the life of Liza Samuel, a great friend of the ROM

The Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) is pleased to announce that work is underway on the Elizabeth Samuel Garden, a 10,000 square-foot "green roof" on the south portion of the Philosopher's Walk wing. Liza's Garden, as Elizabeth wanted it to be known, will be visible through the south-facing windows of c5 Restaurant Lounge, located at the pinnacle of the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal. Liza’s Garden is expected to be unveiled in mid-June, in commemoration of Liza’s birthday, and is the gift of several trustees in honour of Elizabeth Samuel, former Chair of the ROM Board of Trustees, who passed away this past March.

“Liza Samuel was a wonderful friend of the ROM and served the Museum in numerous ways over many years. While this Garden was in its planning stages prior to Liza’s recent passing, we will now have it to remember her and her great love for her garden and all things green,†said William Thorsell, Director and CEO of the ROM. “Liza’s Garden is not a conventional green roof. Rather, it is innovative and bold, qualities that Liza championed at the ROM.â€

The late Liza Samuel served the Royal Ontario Museum in many roles, including Chair of the Board of Trustees and founding member of the Board of Governors. As a long standing patron, she continued the Samuel family's century of extraordinary generosity in building the Museum.

The creation of Liza’s Garden was led by an advisory committee chaired by former ROM Trustee Nicole Eaton, ROM Heritage Governor Susanne Loewen, ROM Board member Jack Cockwell and Kelvin Browne, ROM’s Executive Director of Marketing and Commercial Development. Designed by Plant Architect Inc., Gardens in the Sky, Green Roof Consultant, Liza’s Garden turns an ordinary roofscape into much more than a standard green roof. It creates an environmentally savvy as well as a dynamic landscape. It is a dramatic vista, affording the patrons of c5 a constantly changing natural view, a luxuriant foreground for the distant Toronto skyline.

“We’ve expanded on the current green roof technology to create a rooftop garden that adds an architectural vibrancy to the ROM. Liza’s Garden draws the viewer’s eye through the window and out onto the roof in all seasons,†said Lisa Rapoport, Partner PLANT Architect Inc.

The staggered grid of trees will capture the movement of the wind. The planting beds will be tilted, catching rain and snow between them, at the same time reflecting the sky. In consultation with ROM curators of botany, the plantings have been chosen to evoke abundance – a key distinction between garden and green roof. This is particularly remarkable as the roof is able to support just three inches of soil. As an added advantage, the roof will enhance the sustainability of the ROM in a number of ways: through storm water retention, reduction of the heat island effect, and the provision of a habitat for birds and insects.

This roof garden has been funded in Liza’s honour by her former board colleagues, her family, friends, members of the Department of Museum Volunteers, and other generous donations made in her memory. Additional support has been provided by the TD Friends of the Environment Foundation, the City of Toronto Green Roof Incentive Program, and an anonymous foundation.

Design Team: PLANT Architect Inc.
PLANT has been awarded a CSLA Regional Merit award for Liza’s Garden and was selected by competition to lead the Nathan Phillips Square Revitalization Project.

Green Roof Consultant: Gardens in the Sky

Lighting Consultant: Suzanne Powadiuk

Structural and Roofing Membrane: Halsall Engineering
_________________________________________________________________

A small rendering is available from the PLANT Architects news:

http://www.branchplant.com/news.html

AoD
 
This is very good news. The view from c5 is great - except for that roof - and the need for a garden there was screaming out when a number of us met for lunch at c5 when it first opened last year. I hope it can all be built and planted by the end of May - having this up and growing this summer will be quite a boon to the restaurant and the ROM as a whole.

42
 
It would be even neater if they can grow some of the vegs and herbs used at the C5 on the green roof - apparently that's what they do at the Royal York.

AoD
 
The streets were relatively dead today...

...Back to work Monday's Torontonians? The colder weather? A recession?

Anyway, here's a look at my favourite hot dog stand:
DSC02852.jpg
 
urbandreamer said:
...Back to work Monday's Torontonians? The colder weather? A recession?

Anyway, here's a look at my favourite hot dog stand:
DSC02852.jpg
Click to expand...

I love that view. Great pic!

I also noticed it was pretty dead out there today. There was absolutely no rush hour on the 401 going west into Mississauga this evening!
 
That pic (and the sidewalk and streetscape) is certainly evidence that we need a Bloor St. makeover.
 
From the Globe, Toronto Section:

ROYAL ONTARIO MUSEUM: LIZA'S GARDEN
A rooftop garden fit for a philanthropist

ALEX BOZIKOVIC

May 17, 2008

When you sit down to lunch at the Royal Ontario Museum's C5 restaurant, you may be in elite company, but you don't get a million-dollar view. When the museum reopened last year, its glossy new restaurant faced a grim rooftop. "It looked like 10,000 square feet of asphalt," architect Lisa Rapoport says.

That's changing right now with the construction of Liza's Garden, an innovative project that will be unveiled in June. Unlike most gardens, this one will be there just to be seen.

Designed by Ms. Rapoport's firm, PLANT Architect, the garden is based on one central idea: The entire landscape is arranged to form a lively and colourful scene from one point of view. "It's odd, because it's space you're never going to walk through," she says. A series of hills and valleys will carry plantings in different colours, accented by a few trees, blue glass, and "light cables" - which will create a nighttime spectacle and give birds a place to perch.

The garden design (which has already won an award from the Canadian Society of Landscape Architects) also raises some questions. The field of landscape design has come a long way since the gardens of Versailles, but the idea of a landscape as backdrop is still powerful: One ROM trustee asked if PLANT could make their initial design "more picturesque." And Ms. Rapoport says that helped turn Liza's Garden into a play on 18th-century conventions.

"In a picturesque view, your eye rocks back and forth on a diagonal," she says. "So we actually changed the topography so that your eye takes a zigzagging wander through the site." But here it's going to be created by LED lighting and triangular land forms - an artificial and contemporary vocabulary.

For the museum, the garden fills a significant gap in the completion of its Michael Lee-Chin Crystal. During the crystal's construction, "we would go up there on our hard-hat tours and we realized we needed a green roof," says the museum's chief executive officer, William Thorsell. His idea was for a conventional green roof: a layer of thin soil and hardy ground cover. But "I always expected to put it off," Mr. Thorsell says, "because our larger capital campaign was going on."

But when the idea of a green roof came up at a board meeting last June, chairman Jack Cockwell stepped up with an answer. He offered to pledge most of the budget on the spot, on one condition: The garden should be named after Elizabeth Samuel, a former chair of the board. Ms. Samuel was ill, and she had a long history with the museum as a volunteer, a docent and a trustee. Along with her late husband, Ernest, she was what Mr. Thorsell describes as a "major benefactor"; following the philanthropic example of Ernest's grandfather, Sigmund Samuel, Ms. Samuel put $5-million toward the ROM's renovation project.

And to honour her, Mr. Cockwell wanted the announcement to happen that day, in her presence. "So I ran around and made some calls, and at the end of the meeting we made the announcement," Mr. Thorsell remembers. "It was an emotional moment."

A few museum executives and trustees took charge of the project, led by Kelvin Browne, then the head of the museum's Institute of Contemporary Culture.

Mr. Browne, former editor of Gardening Life magazine, wanted the garden to become something more creative, in keeping with Ms. Samuel's personality. "We felt it should be forward-looking," he says, "because she was."

With a budget of about $500,000, Mr. Browne steered the job to PLANT Architect, which works in architecture and landscape architecture - largely because of the firm's winning design proposal to renew Nathan Phillips Square. "They seemed to be able to do something very good and contemporary, while working within an existing setting," says Mr. Browne, who is now ROM's director of marketing.

And of course the museum today is a challenging setting for design work. The Lee-Chin Crystal, designed by Studio Daniel Libeskind, is probably Toronto's most visible - and controversial - piece of contemporary architecture. But since the garden will be seen only from inside the Crystal, Libeskind's design wasn't much of an issue. Seen from above, the plan "has this very Libeskind-looking fractured look," Ms. Rapoport says. But that's really a coincidence: "There wasn't a lot of discussion about how that relates to the big silver thing at the end of the roof," she adds.

Ms. Samuel approved of the garden's ideas, though she didn't live to see its completion; she died in March of cancer and emphysema. (A flood of donations in her memory has almost covered the garden's cost.) But when the project is completed next month, it will be an appropriate tribute to her, Mr. Browne says.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20080517.GARDEN17/TPStory/TPEntertainment/Ontario/

AoD
 
Does anybody know whatever happened to the much talked about Libeskind chandelier? It was supposed to hang in the stair of wonders correct? I never heard of it again.
 
Thanks for that great pic Tomms - I almost thought I was looking at the ROM Courtyard under construction.

For all the dissatisfaction and criticisms (valid or otherwise) - one have to admire the audacity of the expansion. It's still a small miracle IMO that it happened in Toronto.

AoD
 
AlvinofDiaspar said:
Thanks for that great pic Tomms - I almost thought I was looking at the ROM Courtyard under construction.

For all the dissatisfaction and criticisms (valid or otherwise) - one have to admire the audacity of the expansion. It's still a small miracle IMO that it happened in Toronto.

AoD
Click to expand...

Why does one have to admire it just because it's audacious. If anything it's ostentatious. As is OCAD. Two buildings trying to be avant garde or just really something spectacular but falling well short.
 
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