Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum’s Crystal: a Time Lapse Video

Ah, Toronto. My old stomping grounds where my little sister now lives at. Can’t wait to move back.

@ Carrington

I know what you mean. While helping my little sister move to the U of T dorms I couldn’t help but cringe at the site of the museum. It does quickly become an eye sore after the initial amazement.

Goodness, that’s quite an abortion, isn’t it? Were they trying to outdo the I.M. Pei work at the Louvre? Some sort of a battle of museum wreckovation concepts?

It’s one thing to design a new ugly deconstructed structure, but something entirely different to hack up an existing building with a slap-on that makes no attempt to be sympathetic to the original structure. Additions throughout a building’s life are ometimes necessary and it’s not necessarily desirable that they be 100% seemless (ever see brickwork match perfectly? It’s impossible… better not to try) with the original, but they should *respect* the existing design. Architecture is art and it’s a shame to have some new architect piss all over a predecessor’s work so that he can get more attention.

Bloody awful.

Looks exactly like a building designed by the same architect in Denver that opened last year. Not only is it ugly, but Toronto got the clone!

Sid doesn’t know everything (by a long short), but has strong feelings on what he does know.

I’m not big on it either, but I’m not a fan of modern architecture – this piece in particular. Still, despite the risk of being blinding on sunny days, I can’t help but admire it’s complexity. I saw it every day from start to finish and even recently had the opportunity to look at the blue prints. If you couldn’t look at it with some amount of respect before, you would after flipping through those prints.

I do wish that the ROM had gone ahead and bit the financial bullet and had it finished properly. The original design called for a lot more glass, and the building is weaker without it.

It’s not just a matter of taste, but of waste! I listened to an architecture prof explain why the structure couldn’t have been built of glass or plexi: it wouldn’t have possible to have those materials at those angles without considerable metal support, which would have ruined the look. Secondarily, transparent panels would have looked like garbage with opaque adhesive holding them together, but the only sufficiently strong transparent or translucent adhesives apparently degrade in direct sunlight! Then there’s the matter of the German engineering firm who were supposed to ensure that the joins between the older structure and the crystal were water-tight. As my inside source told me, they procrastinated beginning work and held up the completion of construction before finally admitting that they didn’t think it could be done. So, tens of millions of $$$ doesn’t buy something that won’t leak.