Sir Novelty Fashion
Senior Member
I'm just saying that that line of thinking held Queen's Park in thrall for eight years, and look where it got us.
I'm just saying that that line of thinking held Queen's Park in thrall for eight years, and look where it got us.
fiendishlibrarian
Active Member
Two-page write-up in the latest Time.
You know my views on it. Feh.
And I'll second the vagina thing...
You know my views on it. Feh.
And I'll second the vagina thing...
wyliepoon
Senior Member
Can't get enough of the ROM? More photos from the Crystal on Tuesday night...
Atrium skylights with natural lighting
A look at those skylights again
New entrance to Egyptian exhibit... terrible compared to what was there before
Another doorway between the old ROM and the Crystal. Another example of the poor design in the linkage between the old and the new.
Another connection between the Crystal and the old ROM
Remember this space? The re-creation of Point Pelee used to be where the teepee is now.
The Bat Cave was saved, but the entrance is now nothing but a hole in the wall.
The fire stairs of the Crystal
Eerily quiet reptiles exhibit, with most of the lights in the display cases turned off.
Canada Court, formerly the connection to the Planetarium.
Elevator corridor at B1 level
View looking through the grate at the Spirit House. There's a pile of rocks two floors down.
The last of the old ROM logos with the crown
Museum subway station
Atrium skylights with natural lighting
A look at those skylights again
New entrance to Egyptian exhibit... terrible compared to what was there before
Another doorway between the old ROM and the Crystal. Another example of the poor design in the linkage between the old and the new.
Another connection between the Crystal and the old ROM
Remember this space? The re-creation of Point Pelee used to be where the teepee is now.
The Bat Cave was saved, but the entrance is now nothing but a hole in the wall.
The fire stairs of the Crystal
Eerily quiet reptiles exhibit, with most of the lights in the display cases turned off.
Canada Court, formerly the connection to the Planetarium.
Elevator corridor at B1 level
View looking through the grate at the Spirit House. There's a pile of rocks two floors down.
The last of the old ROM logos with the crown
Museum subway station
urbandreamer
recession proof
Now I haven't been to the crystal yet...But judging from your photos, the difference between the old and new is astonishing. The old building was built to much higher architectural standards--built to last and is beautiful. The new addition really does look temporary. I think I agree with Lisa Rochon for a change. That is the sad truth. The crystal would make a nice conference centre building or exhibition hall; but as a gallery or museum? Once again, the white minimalism is overbearing, the lack of details and "surprises" is frankly surprising. So, for now, I stand by my observation: The ROM Barn is what I shall call it!
(btw, nice views of Bloor St--Can't wait until Lobby/McD's/Subway are redeveloped--within 5 years is my call--McD's can always move abit further towards Spadina or even into the Colonade (or ROM?)
Is the ROM Crystal open this weekend? I'll have to go inside to make a final judgement.
(btw, nice views of Bloor St--Can't wait until Lobby/McD's/Subway are redeveloped--within 5 years is my call--McD's can always move abit further towards Spadina or even into the Colonade (or ROM?)
Is the ROM Crystal open this weekend? I'll have to go inside to make a final judgement.
Tewder
Senior Member
I truly feel that people should still wait until the project is complete in its entirety before passing judgement. The Crystal is still pretty much under construction inside, and the whole thing should only be judged and appreciated once the little details have been finished, the little problems fixed, and more importantly when the collections and exhibits have been installed, adding their colour, beauty and interest such that all of a sudden those stark white walls will finally make sense as the canvas/backdrop to what after all is the most important thing about the museum which is not the architecture, believe it or not.
Although I passed by briefly on Saturday, I was quickly turned off and away by the poor organization of the event: unless you were a 'V.I.P.' you were pretty much s.o.l as far as the events on Bloor St. go! I now think I am going to wait for things to calm down, and wait for the exhibits to be on display again, and wait for a quiet day when the crowds have gone to walk through and enjoy a day at the museum.
Although I passed by briefly on Saturday, I was quickly turned off and away by the poor organization of the event: unless you were a 'V.I.P.' you were pretty much s.o.l as far as the events on Bloor St. go! I now think I am going to wait for things to calm down, and wait for the exhibits to be on display again, and wait for a quiet day when the crowds have gone to walk through and enjoy a day at the museum.
bengaijin
Active Member
This is it?
I visited the ROM yesterday and was astonished at how utterly shitty and slipshod a piece of architecture it was - from the 'grand' gestures down to the ill-conceived details. I'm still a bit traumatized, because I had convinced myself that I was going to be dazzled once I had a chance to enter the building, that the suspicions raised by the exterior's shortcomings would be allayed...
Not even close.
It is a drywall monster, completely devoid of material richness or even the slightest degree of craft. Important things like lights, doors, and firehose cabinets are tacked on with complete disregard for any guiding design concept. The joints between the new structure and the old are almost comically amateurish. I'm not sure that this project ever evolved beyond the infamous napkin sketches - the execution seems entirely divorced from the concept.
Libeskind might try to dodge this accusation by prattling on about 'limiting budgets', but don't be fooled, with the kind of money he had someone else could have made a masterpiece. Moriyama and Teshima built an immeasurably more sophisticated - but comparable (angled walls, vertiginous spaces, etc) - museum in Ottawa for just over half of Libeskind's budget.
The only glimmer of hope for this heap lies in the hands of the exhibit designers. If the objects are displayed with the clarity and elegance of the redesigned asian collections maybe they can distract the eye from the architecture's shortcomings.
Maybe.
I visited the ROM yesterday and was astonished at how utterly shitty and slipshod a piece of architecture it was - from the 'grand' gestures down to the ill-conceived details. I'm still a bit traumatized, because I had convinced myself that I was going to be dazzled once I had a chance to enter the building, that the suspicions raised by the exterior's shortcomings would be allayed...
Not even close.
It is a drywall monster, completely devoid of material richness or even the slightest degree of craft. Important things like lights, doors, and firehose cabinets are tacked on with complete disregard for any guiding design concept. The joints between the new structure and the old are almost comically amateurish. I'm not sure that this project ever evolved beyond the infamous napkin sketches - the execution seems entirely divorced from the concept.
Libeskind might try to dodge this accusation by prattling on about 'limiting budgets', but don't be fooled, with the kind of money he had someone else could have made a masterpiece. Moriyama and Teshima built an immeasurably more sophisticated - but comparable (angled walls, vertiginous spaces, etc) - museum in Ottawa for just over half of Libeskind's budget.
The only glimmer of hope for this heap lies in the hands of the exhibit designers. If the objects are displayed with the clarity and elegance of the redesigned asian collections maybe they can distract the eye from the architecture's shortcomings.
Maybe.
ShonTron
Moderator
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Tewder, I absolutely agree with your second point (and hope that your first point comes true, which I have some confidence in). The organization of Saturday night was horrid - the bleechers were a disgrace (should have had half the number and reserve them for real VIPs - the G-G and Consort, Thorsell, Lee-Chin and family, McGuinty, Oda, Westons and their entourages. As I saw them all walking past, the question I had is who are these people?
Everyone else treated the same. I got in fairly close only by chatting it up with the staffers, paid-duty cops and guards, and was one of a few people they pointed to when the cop said "you, you and you" - go ahead.
Wylie's pics sure make the museum look a lot less crowded, and I think it is time for a sober second look - probably tomorrow or Friday.
ShonTron
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Wylie,
Thanks for the pics. I really do hope the metal doors are temporary. I would hope that glass doors more similar to those recently installed in the older wings will be installed. I really hope that most of the complaints (which are minor) will be addressed once it is reopened. I think it will look better, but the if is by how much. We must wait and see, but I do hold hope, and will not dismiss these things yet.
Thanks for the pics. I really do hope the metal doors are temporary. I would hope that glass doors more similar to those recently installed in the older wings will be installed. I really hope that most of the complaints (which are minor) will be addressed once it is reopened. I think it will look better, but the if is by how much. We must wait and see, but I do hold hope, and will not dismiss these things yet.
AndreaPalladio
Senior Member
The Times and the New Yorker have been singing the praises of Steven Holl's Kansas museum addition. Nothing yet in either about the ROM. Perhaps they are waiting for the displays to be installed so they can review it properly.
scarberiankhatru
Senior Member
Can you please visit the inside and give us another rant
Your last one triggered a hilariously bad response article from Joey Slinger in the Star.
Here's Time's article:
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Star Burst
Thursday, May. 31, 2007 By RICHARD LACAYO/TORONTO
A DIFFERENT ANGLE: Libeskind's addition to the Royal Ontario Museum rises out of the old building
After a long recession in the 1990s, for much of the past seven years Toronto has enjoyed an enormous building boom. Downtown is stuffed with new corporate headquarters. Around the shore of Lake Ontario the skyline is bristling with condo towers. Nearly all the construction from these years has been fairly conventional, though — this is still a city where the developer's box rules. But in one part of town, the rules have changed. On June 2 the venerable Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) will officially open a new addition designed by the architect Daniel Libeskind in his most implacable and declarative style. And with that, the boomtown will be getting a building that goes boom all by itself.
Libeskind's $135 million addition to the ROM, called the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal after its lead donor, is resolutely unlike anything Toronto — or most cities — has seen before. To begin with, it doesn't look much like the original building, which is actually two buildings: a yellow brick structure from 1912 that was overtaken in 1932 by a weighty limestone addition in a Beaux Arts style with trace elements of the Gothic and Baroque. Libeskind's Crystal bursts from the old museum's limestone in pointed shards of anodized aluminum. It touches the ground with the jagged footprint of a fever chart. Windows slice across the surface in narrow diagonal stripes or in large trapezoids that cut widely up and across the building's various façades and open views to several floors at once. Though the impulse to enter is irresistible, it may take a moment to find the door.
In other words, like his Jewish Museum in Berlin and his recent addition to the Denver Art Museum, this is another Libeskind building sure to have people asking, "What's that about?" To which Libeskind says, "Fine." He designed the thing precisely to evoke that response. "This is not something that you know," he says. "It's a reinvention. It's not just business as usual. It's not just another black box."
In every century there are certain buildings that are conceived and executed purposely to change the course of architectural history. This is what Horace Walpole had in mind with Strawberry Hill, his 18th century faux-medieval villa on the outskirts of London that defied the Neoclassical consensus of his time and triggered the Gothic Revival. It was what Le Corbusier set out to do with the Villa Savoie, the landmark Modernist house. Libeskind, 61, who spent much of his early career as an architectural theoretician and teacher, routinely operates at the same level of ambition. With his most important projects — and Toronto is one of them — he makes what you might call polemical buildings. They're manifestos in metal and glass, intended to move the argument forward about what's possible in architecture, what a building can look like.
I love orthogonal architecture," he says, using the term for buildings based on right angles. "But it's old-fashioned. It belongs to a certain period in history." And in Libeskind's view, that period is behind us. The future belongs to space that has been stretched, tilted and folded. "In a democratic society architecture has many possibilities," he says. "We're not meant to become 'rigor mortised' at some point and say, 'This is it. Now there's nothing more will happen.' Economics is changing, art is changing, science is changing, everything is developing. Why should architecture not also be part of new discoveries?"
Sunny, oracular and indefatigable, Libeskind tends to smile, especially when he's at his most argumentative. He knows that people like their geniuses to be daringly off the cuff sometimes. So he sketched out his initial plan for the museum on a dozen or so napkins, which the ROM duly displayed behind frames when it mounted a show of proposals by the architects in the running for the commission. But ROM director William Thorsell says that Libeskind followed up his napkins with the most thorough analysis of the project offered by any of the contenders for the job.
Above all, both men were giving a lot of thought to the potential of the new building to bring life to Bloor Street, Toronto's main upscale shopping drag. "It was very important to us to see this as an urban project, not just an institutional one," says Thorsell, a former editor in chief of the Globe and Mail who wanted to bring the museum into the wider world he was accustomed to. "The old ROM had its elbows up high against the city; it was a big no. I wanted transparency and engagement on Bloor Street, a major urban interface."
Thorsell admits that when they saw what the interface was going to look like, some regular ROM donors thought "that box" was a little too crazy. "They just couldn't understand us doing this," he says. But others, like Michael Lee-Chin, the billionaire chairman of Portland Holdings, who gave $30 million to put his name on the addition, came through precisely because there was something new on the horizon. So far the museum has raised $228 million toward its goal of $240 million, a sum that covers both Libeskind's new building and extensive renovations to the galleries of the old museum.
Thorsell insists that in choosing Libeskind he didn't think he was taking a risk. That could be, but when Libeskind got the Toronto job, on Feb. 26, 2002, he was famous for exactly one building, the much talked-about Jewish Museum in Berlin that was his first major commission. But one year to the day later Libeskind won the competition to work out the master plan for the World Trade Center site in New York City, a commission that was originally envisioned to include his design for the Freedom Tower, the centerpiece of the project. It was a victory that immediately turned him into an architectural celebrity of the first order in the U.S. His big smile, his black-framed eyeglasses, his Armani suits and cowboy boots were everywhere in the media.
The Trade Center project didn't work out as planned. The developer who held the lease on the Twin Towers had ideas of his own. He brought in another architect, David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, an outfit famous for providing corporations with prestige headquarters, like the Sears Tower and John Hancock Building in Chicago, that are still within their aesthetic comfort zone. For a while Childs and Libeskind collaborated on the Freedom Tower, but the final design, which is now in the first stages of construction, was so unlike Libeskind's original vision that he removed his name from it.
But by that time his name was everywhere else. Today he employs about 180 people at his studio in New York City, a branch in Zurich and several small project offices around the world. His operations are global — condo towers in Singapore and Warsaw, a shopping mall in Bern, a performing-arts center in Dublin. Or almost global. At a time when architects are flocking to China, Libeskind, who grew up under communism in Poland, refuses to accept commissions from Beijing.
Libeskind's addition to the Denver Art Museum, which opened last fall, won some rave reviews but also ran into criticism that its angular gallery spaces, with their diagonal walls — spaces not so different from his new ones at the ROM — were inhospitable to the art or even the public. To meet U.S. safety codes, the museum had to apply 7.5-cm-tall wooden markers ("courtesy curbs") on the floor in some galleries to prevent visitors from advancing into inward-sloping walls and bumping their heads. Christoph Heinrich, who will become the Denver museum's new curator of modern art in September, has already announced that for one of his first shows he plans to ask artists to offer work that responds to the language of Libeskind's spaces.
The ROM, however, was chartered to be both a fine-art and a natural-history museum. With collections that range from Buddhist sculpture to dinosaurs, it emphasizes objects over pictures, so straight walls are less of a priority. In any case, there are plenty of those in the older part of the ROM. And Libeskind insists that the dynamic lines of the galleries "energize" the works they hold. "The display of art is also not set for eternity," he says. "It has changed over time. Look how things were exhibited in the 19th century. Curators are not people who are asleep. They also want to create a new experience for the viewer."
The ROM interiors already do that by themselves, especially the upper galleries with their trapezoidal spaces and the diagonal slot windows that are something of a Libeskind trademark. However intriguing the avalanching façades of the ROM may be, it's the interiors — tumbling galleries that bring your expectations forcefully into a new alignment — that are the most fascinating thing he has done here.
The great public buildings of the early 21st century — Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, the Seattle Public Library by Rem Koolhaas, Libeskind's own addition to the Denver Art Museum — all speak in some variation of this irregular vocabulary. Twentieth century Modernism produced many great buildings, but by the 1970s it was a formula for mediocrity. Ever since, architects — and the rest of us — have been looking for a way out. And Libeskind has been showing one way. He may have produced some argumentative buildings, but they happen to be making the arguments that need to be made.
Even in Toronto. "A building can have a very positive impact," Libeskind says. "People can say, 'This is not just Toronto the good, it's Toronto the interesting!' Why is it expected that this could only happen in Tokyo or London or New York City?"
And by the way," he adds. "Not a single one of my clients has ever asked me to make a box. None of them has said to me, 'We want you to design something like somebody else.'" Well, naturally. They would be crazy to try.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Star Burst
Thursday, May. 31, 2007 By RICHARD LACAYO/TORONTO
A DIFFERENT ANGLE: Libeskind's addition to the Royal Ontario Museum rises out of the old building
After a long recession in the 1990s, for much of the past seven years Toronto has enjoyed an enormous building boom. Downtown is stuffed with new corporate headquarters. Around the shore of Lake Ontario the skyline is bristling with condo towers. Nearly all the construction from these years has been fairly conventional, though — this is still a city where the developer's box rules. But in one part of town, the rules have changed. On June 2 the venerable Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) will officially open a new addition designed by the architect Daniel Libeskind in his most implacable and declarative style. And with that, the boomtown will be getting a building that goes boom all by itself.
Libeskind's $135 million addition to the ROM, called the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal after its lead donor, is resolutely unlike anything Toronto — or most cities — has seen before. To begin with, it doesn't look much like the original building, which is actually two buildings: a yellow brick structure from 1912 that was overtaken in 1932 by a weighty limestone addition in a Beaux Arts style with trace elements of the Gothic and Baroque. Libeskind's Crystal bursts from the old museum's limestone in pointed shards of anodized aluminum. It touches the ground with the jagged footprint of a fever chart. Windows slice across the surface in narrow diagonal stripes or in large trapezoids that cut widely up and across the building's various façades and open views to several floors at once. Though the impulse to enter is irresistible, it may take a moment to find the door.
In other words, like his Jewish Museum in Berlin and his recent addition to the Denver Art Museum, this is another Libeskind building sure to have people asking, "What's that about?" To which Libeskind says, "Fine." He designed the thing precisely to evoke that response. "This is not something that you know," he says. "It's a reinvention. It's not just business as usual. It's not just another black box."
In every century there are certain buildings that are conceived and executed purposely to change the course of architectural history. This is what Horace Walpole had in mind with Strawberry Hill, his 18th century faux-medieval villa on the outskirts of London that defied the Neoclassical consensus of his time and triggered the Gothic Revival. It was what Le Corbusier set out to do with the Villa Savoie, the landmark Modernist house. Libeskind, 61, who spent much of his early career as an architectural theoretician and teacher, routinely operates at the same level of ambition. With his most important projects — and Toronto is one of them — he makes what you might call polemical buildings. They're manifestos in metal and glass, intended to move the argument forward about what's possible in architecture, what a building can look like.
I love orthogonal architecture," he says, using the term for buildings based on right angles. "But it's old-fashioned. It belongs to a certain period in history." And in Libeskind's view, that period is behind us. The future belongs to space that has been stretched, tilted and folded. "In a democratic society architecture has many possibilities," he says. "We're not meant to become 'rigor mortised' at some point and say, 'This is it. Now there's nothing more will happen.' Economics is changing, art is changing, science is changing, everything is developing. Why should architecture not also be part of new discoveries?"
Sunny, oracular and indefatigable, Libeskind tends to smile, especially when he's at his most argumentative. He knows that people like their geniuses to be daringly off the cuff sometimes. So he sketched out his initial plan for the museum on a dozen or so napkins, which the ROM duly displayed behind frames when it mounted a show of proposals by the architects in the running for the commission. But ROM director William Thorsell says that Libeskind followed up his napkins with the most thorough analysis of the project offered by any of the contenders for the job.
Above all, both men were giving a lot of thought to the potential of the new building to bring life to Bloor Street, Toronto's main upscale shopping drag. "It was very important to us to see this as an urban project, not just an institutional one," says Thorsell, a former editor in chief of the Globe and Mail who wanted to bring the museum into the wider world he was accustomed to. "The old ROM had its elbows up high against the city; it was a big no. I wanted transparency and engagement on Bloor Street, a major urban interface."
Thorsell admits that when they saw what the interface was going to look like, some regular ROM donors thought "that box" was a little too crazy. "They just couldn't understand us doing this," he says. But others, like Michael Lee-Chin, the billionaire chairman of Portland Holdings, who gave $30 million to put his name on the addition, came through precisely because there was something new on the horizon. So far the museum has raised $228 million toward its goal of $240 million, a sum that covers both Libeskind's new building and extensive renovations to the galleries of the old museum.
Thorsell insists that in choosing Libeskind he didn't think he was taking a risk. That could be, but when Libeskind got the Toronto job, on Feb. 26, 2002, he was famous for exactly one building, the much talked-about Jewish Museum in Berlin that was his first major commission. But one year to the day later Libeskind won the competition to work out the master plan for the World Trade Center site in New York City, a commission that was originally envisioned to include his design for the Freedom Tower, the centerpiece of the project. It was a victory that immediately turned him into an architectural celebrity of the first order in the U.S. His big smile, his black-framed eyeglasses, his Armani suits and cowboy boots were everywhere in the media.
The Trade Center project didn't work out as planned. The developer who held the lease on the Twin Towers had ideas of his own. He brought in another architect, David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, an outfit famous for providing corporations with prestige headquarters, like the Sears Tower and John Hancock Building in Chicago, that are still within their aesthetic comfort zone. For a while Childs and Libeskind collaborated on the Freedom Tower, but the final design, which is now in the first stages of construction, was so unlike Libeskind's original vision that he removed his name from it.
But by that time his name was everywhere else. Today he employs about 180 people at his studio in New York City, a branch in Zurich and several small project offices around the world. His operations are global — condo towers in Singapore and Warsaw, a shopping mall in Bern, a performing-arts center in Dublin. Or almost global. At a time when architects are flocking to China, Libeskind, who grew up under communism in Poland, refuses to accept commissions from Beijing.
Libeskind's addition to the Denver Art Museum, which opened last fall, won some rave reviews but also ran into criticism that its angular gallery spaces, with their diagonal walls — spaces not so different from his new ones at the ROM — were inhospitable to the art or even the public. To meet U.S. safety codes, the museum had to apply 7.5-cm-tall wooden markers ("courtesy curbs") on the floor in some galleries to prevent visitors from advancing into inward-sloping walls and bumping their heads. Christoph Heinrich, who will become the Denver museum's new curator of modern art in September, has already announced that for one of his first shows he plans to ask artists to offer work that responds to the language of Libeskind's spaces.
The ROM, however, was chartered to be both a fine-art and a natural-history museum. With collections that range from Buddhist sculpture to dinosaurs, it emphasizes objects over pictures, so straight walls are less of a priority. In any case, there are plenty of those in the older part of the ROM. And Libeskind insists that the dynamic lines of the galleries "energize" the works they hold. "The display of art is also not set for eternity," he says. "It has changed over time. Look how things were exhibited in the 19th century. Curators are not people who are asleep. They also want to create a new experience for the viewer."
The ROM interiors already do that by themselves, especially the upper galleries with their trapezoidal spaces and the diagonal slot windows that are something of a Libeskind trademark. However intriguing the avalanching façades of the ROM may be, it's the interiors — tumbling galleries that bring your expectations forcefully into a new alignment — that are the most fascinating thing he has done here.
The great public buildings of the early 21st century — Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, the Seattle Public Library by Rem Koolhaas, Libeskind's own addition to the Denver Art Museum — all speak in some variation of this irregular vocabulary. Twentieth century Modernism produced many great buildings, but by the 1970s it was a formula for mediocrity. Ever since, architects — and the rest of us — have been looking for a way out. And Libeskind has been showing one way. He may have produced some argumentative buildings, but they happen to be making the arguments that need to be made.
Even in Toronto. "A building can have a very positive impact," Libeskind says. "People can say, 'This is not just Toronto the good, it's Toronto the interesting!' Why is it expected that this could only happen in Tokyo or London or New York City?"
And by the way," he adds. "Not a single one of my clients has ever asked me to make a box. None of them has said to me, 'We want you to design something like somebody else.'" Well, naturally. They would be crazy to try.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
fiendishlibrarian
Active Member
When I saw these pictures, I couldn't get Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon out of my head. That's the first thing that came to mind upon seeing these photos, jarring collisions of Picassoian pussy.
Nothing I have seen and read here changes my opinion of this place. The fire-exit segues between wings, the Kafkaesque corridors, the incongruity, the depressing contrast between the diginity of the old wings and the cheap exhibitionism of the new, and, AND, the incompetence of the organizers to boot! No, if anything, my pre-existing opinion is even stronger now than it was before. The place seems steeped in misery and grit-your-teeth-and-like-it grimness. I don't believe it will do anything but cheapen and degrade whatever is put in it. In its pushiness and contempt of history, grace, proportion and context, it is the ultimate Boomer building: tasteless, classless, arrogant and hopelessly self-absorbed. Someone, somewhere, was grievously conned.
Feh.
Nothing I have seen and read here changes my opinion of this place. The fire-exit segues between wings, the Kafkaesque corridors, the incongruity, the depressing contrast between the diginity of the old wings and the cheap exhibitionism of the new, and, AND, the incompetence of the organizers to boot! No, if anything, my pre-existing opinion is even stronger now than it was before. The place seems steeped in misery and grit-your-teeth-and-like-it grimness. I don't believe it will do anything but cheapen and degrade whatever is put in it. In its pushiness and contempt of history, grace, proportion and context, it is the ultimate Boomer building: tasteless, classless, arrogant and hopelessly self-absorbed. Someone, somewhere, was grievously conned.
Feh.
wyliepoon
Senior Member
If you want to see the ROM, avoid the crowds, and don't want to pay the steep $20 admission, go see it one hour before closing (since this week the opening hours have been extended to 9:30, go at 8:30) tonight or tomorrow night. I bet the museum will be crowded on Friday night with the reduced admission ($5), and probably all weekend as well.
AlvinofDiaspar
Moderator
So far, from what I have seen, the only disappointing aspects IMO is the way the new building interfaced with the old at the upper floors. Nothing additional money wouldn't solve, I might add.
Didn't find the drywalling to be bad at all - T1 is a much more atrocious example as to how boring the material can be when used en masse. That said, it would have been nice if the sides facing Gloria Lee-Chin atrium could be clad in say neoparies instead. Think that and Penrose tiling patterns...
AoD
Didn't find the drywalling to be bad at all - T1 is a much more atrocious example as to how boring the material can be when used en masse. That said, it would have been nice if the sides facing Gloria Lee-Chin atrium could be clad in say neoparies instead. Think that and Penrose tiling patterns...
AoD
ponyboy
Active Member
disorienting, challenging, and wonderful
I feel confident that the Crystal is an important building, one that will become an icon for the city and well known internationally. I find the design language uplifting and contemplative. Most groundbreaking art polarizes the public at first. Most people are simply not early adopters of innovations, and need to be brought through with time, familiarity, and approval of those of status they aspire to. I do agree that the transitions to the old wings are poor, and the time pressure has left some things unfinished. I expect that to be corrected. Toronto will in time be proud to have this important building; it is the architects best to date.
I feel confident that the Crystal is an important building, one that will become an icon for the city and well known internationally. I find the design language uplifting and contemplative. Most groundbreaking art polarizes the public at first. Most people are simply not early adopters of innovations, and need to be brought through with time, familiarity, and approval of those of status they aspire to. I do agree that the transitions to the old wings are poor, and the time pressure has left some things unfinished. I expect that to be corrected. Toronto will in time be proud to have this important building; it is the architects best to date.