Renowned architect takes on Toronto

Libeskind's glass house openly invites stone throwers to the Royal Ontario Museum

Hoardings went up in early June for architect Daniel Libeskind's massive addition to the Royal Ontario Museum - a soaring deconstructivist phantasia that promises to be the most eye-stopping building in Toronto since Viljo Revell's New City Hall opened in 1965.
The venerable ROM, today the fifth largest museum in North America, wasn't built in a day. Since opening in 1914, the H-shaped cultural giant has undergone a series of renovations and additions - the latest of which was completed in 1982. The current plan is to demolish the north wing to make room for an ambitious new main entrance facing Bloor Street West - a landmark jagged crystalline structure which together with renovations of existing galleries is being touted as the $200-million Renaissance ROM.
The buzz is about Libeskind, 57, the Berlin-based architectural superstar who became an international celebrity in February when chosen with much fanfare by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation to reconstruct Ground Zero. Studio Daniel Libeskind is leading the ROM design team in a joint venture with Toronto's Bregman + Hamann Architects. Together they're adding 40,000 square feet in six major new galleries. Construction is set to begin in October with a projected completion date in December 2005.
Great architecture doesn't come cheap. The Crystal will cost $70 million. In March 2002, Queen's Park, through the SuperBuild initiative, earmarked $30 million for the project. In May 2002, a matching $30 million commitment was made by the feds through the Canada-Ontario Infrastructure Program. A campaign, chaired by former Lieutenant-Governor Hilary Weston and launched May 28, is seeking to raise the balance. Two months before that launch, the ROM announced a lead gift of $30 million from Toronto mutual fund maven Michael A. Lee-Chin - whose honour the Crystal will be named after. As well, the four-storey atrium will be called the Hyacinth Gloria Chen Crystal Court, in honour of Lee-Chin's mother. Weston has announced pledges of $24 million, bringing the total to $114 million so far. Her billionaire husband Galen Weston has yet to make a pledge from his family foundation.
The Crystal promises to be a characteristically idiosyncratic deconstructivist jumble of acute and obtuse angles presenting new vistas with every step. Modern architecture's Deconstruction movement holds that buildings should "undo" the expectations one brings to them. Unlike the "less is more" credo of Bauhaus giants like Mies van der Rohe - whose sleek 1966 Toronto Dominion Centre revolutionized skyscraper design in Hogtown, deconstructivists like Libeskind and Frank Gehry maintain that more is more, more or less. Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain has achieved the rarefied status of international cultural icon, and ROM director and CEO William Thorsell has similar goals.
Projects of this nature invite hyperbole. ROM curator Des Collins noted the crystallized form of limestone - of which the historic ROM is built - is called a Calcite Rhomb. He dubbed the plan "the crystallized form - the Rhomb - of the ROM."
How will Libeskind's futuristic Rhomb relate to the existing building of traditional stone masonry?
A ROM press release declares Libeskind leaves "all of the historic structures in place, taking out only the Terrace Galleries, and creating a bold new foil to the existing buildings at Bloor Street. His crystalline structure touches lightly on the north face of the east wing, and then he intelligently unites the old and new across the entire site by vaulting over the roof and creating glass slivers on the west and south facades. This avoids the crystal design looking as though it were simply an addition to the north. It weds the old and new across the entire fabric of the site, but delicately and elegantly."
It will be up to the public to decide if Libeskind has indeed successfully melded the seam.
One critic opined: "I love the new design. It is very radical. But it works best if done alone, not as an addition to the ROM. Any addition to the ROM should be done with respect to the architecture and form of the building. For example, see the wings that were added to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. This new structure completely negates the ROM. It is a disservice to both the new structure and the ROM."
Who then is this mad doctor of architecture?
Born to Holocaust survivors in Lodz, Poland in 1946, Libeskind immigrated with his family to Israel in the late 1950s. At the age of seven he began playing the accordion, and prepared for a career as a concert pianist. In the 1960s he moved to the United States, becoming a citizen in 1965 and abandoning music to study architecture. Graduating from New York's Cooper Union in 1970, he later studied architectural theory at Essex University in Britain. For nearly three decades he remained an ivory tower academic who hadn't built a single structure.
His first commission, Berlin's Jewish Museum - which opened two days before the WTC attacks, a striking deconstructivist marvel unlike any other structure cosmopolitan Berliners had ever seen. Clad chiefly with titanium-covered zinc, the building zigzags in a disorienting broken maze resembling an unravelling Star of David or a thunderbolt. The building triggered an unprecedented cultural happening in Berlin - during the 18 months between its completion and dedication, more than 300,000 visitors went to gawk at the totally empty museum Libeskind had designed. The edifice became a key attraction in the new/old capital city bursting with a post-unification building fever and historical consciousness.
The Berlin Museum, like all of Libeskind's small oeuvre of completed buildings, is grounded in a highly abstract theoretical program that is deeply perplexing to visitors. While his architectural references are arcane, they are made palatable with sappy symbolism - just as the architect has planned at the World Trade Center, noted art historian Michael J. Lewis in his essay "Into the Void with Daniel Libeskind" (Commentary, May 2003).
"As at the Jewish Museum, a trio of easily digested symbols made the hermetic geometry palatable: a void in a submerged plaza, an excessively elevated garden (here lodged in the 1,776-foot spire), and a commemorative object (here a Wedge of Light rather than a Stair of Continuity). Once again, symbolism came to the very brink of bathos; having renounced the tyranny of Euclidean geometry, Libeskind decked his design in patriotic American numerology. (He seems not to be aware of how stale the gesture was; a much-cited example of Victorian sentimentalism is the hall of the 1876 Centennial Exhibition, deliberately made 1,876 feet long.)
"As at the Jewish Museum, too, one allegory stumbled over the next. Libeskind's peculiarly faceted towers were precisely aligned with the course of the sun, so that on the anniversary of September 11, light would fall on the sunken plaza. From 8:46 to 10:28 a.m. - the interval between the first attack and the collapse of the second building-"the sun will shine without shadow, in perpetual tribute to altruism and courage."
"Improbably aligning cosmology and uplift, Libeskind's brainy, sappy project rose to the head of the pack."
The new ROM promises to be a sculptural experience, a fun-filled functional folly befitting an institution desperately seeking to lose its elitist label. (Visitors may be disappointed when they learn the Crystal is in fact not made entirely out of glass.) Libeskind's architectural statement is so bold it may overshadow the ROM artifacts it was designed to house. But as long as admissions-paying visitors pour in, does it really matter if they skip the mummies and dinosaurs to ponder the building enshrining them?
Bottom line, is the roof going to leak at the Crystal ROM, as it does at Libeskind's two-year-old Food Theater Café in London - or Revell's New City Hall?

Publication Date: 2003-07-20
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=2953