It's hard, aggressive and in your face. It cantilevers dangerously over the street, shifting the ground from under our feet. Do not expect shelter from the $135-million Michael Lee-Chin crystalline addition to Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum by Daniel Libeskind. Expect the exaltation of one architect, one man, one individual. Expect the stuff of Libeskind: an exile, a brilliant thinker, a marketer with a silver tongue.
Come into this person's life, see their triumphs, feel their sorrow — such is the nature of the prurient and morbid explorations of the 21st-century individual. Oprah, Jerry Springer, Dr. Phil, they cannot begin to satisfy our ambition to know, our desire to be exposed. This is my space. Read my Facebook. Here we go again with the exaltation of the individual, except this time a guy decides to assault the street with his architecture.
Okay, everybody: Let's try to understand it.
First of all, a city as large and complex as Toronto has room for this kind of audacious experiment. There is architectural delirium at the reinvented ROM. And ecstasy, too.
The Stair of Wonders is a disarming composition of folded planes best appreciated when viewed from below, looking up several storeys through its core.
For this, ROM CEO William Thorsell, a passionate defender of architecture and public space who insisted that something fantastic occur in an ancillary circulation space, can be thanked as much as Libeskind, designer of the entire museum expansion in a joint venture with Bregman + Hamann Architects of Toronto. Also because of Thorsell, the public square on Bloor Street has been cleared of the city's usual portfolio of junk. Now minimalist lighting standards by Montreal's Éclairage Public will eventually grace the front of the museum. The Crystal Five (C5) restaurant, produced by local hipsters II X IV Design Associates within the penthouse of Libeskind's sharply angled envelope, offers an exhilarating station from which to view Toronto's magnificence as well as its sophomoric disorder. In the future, another of Thorsell's laudable ambitions — green roofs — will be added to the ROM's new topography.
Mostly, though, the new ROM rages at the world. This rage I cannot pretend to understand. But, it surely has something to do with losing 85 of your relatives during the Holocaust, of playing the accordion not the piano because of what the neighbours in Lodz, Poland, might say, of scribbling mad, inspired drawings in relative isolation at Michigan's Cranbrook Academy of Art, of only knowing the pleasure of building at the age of 52. Libeskind speaks often of all of this. His architecture is his Facebook.
You already know how the building bullies its way past the genteel east and west wings built in the early 20th century when craft, scale and permanence were pre-eminent in the minds of client and architect.
Whereas the 1912-14 museum by Darling & Pearson responded to the delights of neighbouring Philosopher's Walk with a tapestry of buff brick corbels and arched windows, Libeskind offers the angled face of the most desolate outcrop and matches the dog's breakfast aesthetic of commerce across Bloor with an exterior cladding of grey, anodized aluminum. Thorsell tells me the tone of the grey was chosen for its slightly warm hue, but all I can see is the colour of something dissonant, the colour, say, of Elektra's humiliation in Richard Strauss's opera.
There is more angst on the inside where windows cut like jagged scars across gallery walls, where steel grating makes for an uneasy, noisy floor on the many catwalks. The main lobby is an oppressive gesture, made especially heavy-handed by a ski slope of uneven drywall. There are mean views through the courtyard to the historic brick elevation and the access to the Samuel Hall/Currelly Gallery, restored as part of the $240-million in construction costs spent on Renaissance ROM.
