Word: libeskind
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...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...
...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...
...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...
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...