Star Burst

A DIFFERENT ANGLE: Libeskind's addition to the Royal Ontario Museum rises out of the old building

COREY MIHAILIUK for TIME; Courtesy of Studio Daniel Libeskind

• Share

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.