News

Toronto will get its biggest architectural celebration of the year tomorrow night, when the Governor-General snips the ribbon on the Royal Ontario Museum's $250-million Michael Lee-Chin Crystal. At last, the public will get to see the contentious building that architects, critics and many other Torontonians have been heatedly arguing about for months.

But while some opponents and enthusiasts have already dug in their heels, the fact remains that none of us has actually seen architect Daniel Libeskind's building as it deserves to be seen.

The hoarding along Bloor Street West has prevented any appreciation of the way the facade strikes the ground and addresses the city. On a tour of the interior earlier this year, I found the extensive scaffolding and construction clutter made it well nigh impossible to grasp the spatial flow and rhythm of Mr. Libeskind's design. Before delivering a final verdict -- as every architectural aficionado I know is hankering to do -- Hogtown would do well to take a deep breath, and wait until this unusual structure opens for business.

But if you like public architectural hullabaloo -- I do -- it's certainly not going to end with the chatter about the Crystal due to start hitting the press this weekend. As I reported in this column last week, the ROM is getting ready to stir up lots more controversy in the months to come.

At issue is the possibility that, by the end of the summer, the ROM and some development partner will recommend a residential skyscraper be raised on the south end of the museum's Edwardian, Depression-era and 21st-century buildings.

I argued last week for keeping the tall-building option on the table, despite the public criticism it's likely to draw, with one proviso: that the proposed tower be artistically brilliant, cutting-edge, unconventional -- a fitting complement, in other words, to the critical thought the University of Toronto (which the building would adjoin) is famous for.

Though architectural mediocrity should be combatted everywhere in the city, a ho-hum skyscraper on the south end of the ROM is absolutely unacceptable. Toronto should not be asked to accept anything less than the best, nor is there any reason why we should be. This discussion is taking place in a period of remarkable advances in tall-building design and construction, much of it facilitated by new digital technologies and urged on by heightened contemporary concern for the natural and urban environment.

Examples of what Toronto could get are out there, already built or in the pipeline. We should hold the ROM's feet to the fire -- if it goes with the tall-building option -- until the museum brings us a proposal equal in beauty and sustainability to the best new skyscrapers in the world.

I am thinking here of stirring structures such as Norman Foster's recent 30 St. Mary Axe, a sleekly aerodynamic skyscraper in London that's gotten the mischievous nickname of "The Gherkin." Circular in plan on a squared-off site, and tapering outward as it rises from the base, this handsome 40-storey building offers much-needed public space at street level in London's tight grid. Energy consumption has been slashed by air-spaces spiralling upward inside the skin: Nothing more complicated than the warmth of the sun operates this unusual ventilation and cooling system much of the year.

The residential tower the ROM is thinking about should be at least as daring and lovely as Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava's Turning Torso in Malmö, Sweden. Based on the dynamics of the human form in motion, this apartment complex is a stack of nine five-storey cubes twisting gracefully as they spring from the earth. And Mr. Calatrava has proposed yet another residential building, this time in Chicago, that could be a model for the museum: a very tall skyscraper that turns into the sky like a bolt of luxurious cloth wound tightly around a slender standing statue.

But perhaps the most urbane, convincing contemporary homage to fluidity and vibrant form now under way anywhere in the world is Morphosis' Phare Tower, in the Parisian business district of La Défense. This dramatic composition of bends, folds and seams will sweep up from a ground-level forest of stilts and struts, giving La Défense a new iconic centre unmatched in its elegance and visual excitement.

Clearly, the ROM (and the rest of us) are not short on examples of what's possible. It's now up to the museum to see that the best architectural thinking of our time is translated into Toronto's urban reality.

Tall tales

As the 21st-century tall-building boom continues to roll over Toronto, it pays to be well informed about the critters. Here are a few recent books and websites that both fans and foes of skyscrapers may want to dip into.

Terrence Riley and Guy Nordenson's Tall Buildings (MoMA, 2003) and the accompanying website (http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/2004/tallbuildings/index_f.html) are richly illustrated documents of an outstanding exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art that surveyed 25 recent tall-building projects and proposals around the world.

Architect Eric Höweler's Skyscraper: Vertical Now (Universe, 2003) covers much the same ground as Tall Buildings, though Mr. Höweler has shaped his material into a handy field guide to the various types of contemporary skyscraper designs.

New Yorker architecture critic Paul Goldberger's very readable Up From Zero: Politics, Architecture and the Rebuilding of New York (Random House, 2005) is the definitive account of the political and artistic controversies that swirled over the World Trade Center site after September 11, 2001.

No serious fan of the tall building should be without Johann Eisele and Ellen Kloft's High-Rise Manual (Birkhauser, 2002). In clearly written essays targeting non-specialists, the authors lay out the hard, fascinating facts of skyscraper design from geotechnics and structural dynamics to the effects of wind.

Ziona Strelitz's Tall Buildings: A Strategic Design Guide (RIBA Publishing, 2005) is a beautifully illustrated manual written for readers in Britain, but it covers all the bases -- energy efficiency, structural systems, safety considerations, the public realm, the works. If you don't like the buildings going up in Toronto, use this book to design better ones.

Computer-driven architectural design is producing new buildings that bend and twist and otherwise ignore the modernist box. A fine (if dauntingly technical) introduction to the crafting of such structures, and to their complex geometries, is Karel Vollers' Twist & Build: Creating Non-Orthogonal Architecture (010 Publishers, 2001).

John Bentley Mays

jmays@globeandmail.com