Historicist: "The city that nobody loves"
Elsewhere in the Ist-a-Verse
Every weekday, we pick an image from the Torontoist Flickr Pool and feature it here on the site. It's our way to give the many excellent photographers in our pool the attention they deserve!
With the official ROM architectural opening less than a week away (more on that later this week), we thought this shot by Torontoist Flickr pool contributor rebootyourcomputer was timely. What catches our attention is the dramatic sky and sense of scale, but particularly the yellowish cast and lightened shadows, which makes this photo look like it was scanned from a late 1960s faded architectural magazine. Without the new Michael Lee-Chin Crystal forming across the face of the 1914 stone façade, there would be nothing in this photo to indicate how recent it is. There are odd angles everywhere, and we also like how the rigid lines and shapes of the buildings frame the random, puffy clouds.
The image is punctuated by the solitary construction worker at the bottom. Perhaps this capture can be seen as a statement of how little humans can build great things, yet there's still an endless sky beyond that dwarfs the presence of even our biggest achievements.
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Your interpretation of this picture is really deep. I like.
Nice picture. Now a comment on the "crystal". As a big supporter of this structure I think we got gypped on the lack of glass. There is more plastic than glass, and all you see through the glass are beams, whether you are looking from inside or from the street. Great structure, bad cover.
mm: I agree on the glass thing. I know a lot of people hate Libeskind's architecture, but I love it, and I was quite excited when I saw the original architectural model, even though I know that pre-built renderings are never exactly like the final as-built design. Still, they were calling it the Crystal and all. Then all of a sudden, most of the glass is gone and what looks like corrugated siding appears all over the new renderings, and everyone started saying with shifty eyes that it was the plan all along. Uh huh.
I still love the new ROM Crystal, though (the photographer of this shot doesn't), and from what I've seen of the inside so far, it's fantastic. And anyway, it is in line with some of Libeskind's other designs, even if he did say with a straight face that it was inspired by the ROM's crystal collection.
Yeah, the translucence was wicked. The crystal lost a good chunk of its charisma when they cancelled the glass. I can't believe there's no way for the ROM to follow the original planned appearance and still protect their collections. Come on, we have the internet but no smart glass?
It looks so parasitic...
I neither hate nor love the Crystal.
However, I'm skeptical of its long-term viability as a built museum structure. What will happen when all that whizz-bang construction technology starts to wear out?
So I suppose I shouldn't feel too grumpy about the likelihood that, sometime during my lifetime, my taxes will be spent on eradicating this grandiose showpiece and replacing it with some other "radical" type of designer architecture.
It's not that I miss the 1980 addition, which never looked much better than a parking garage. It's just that there's lots of better use for the city's cultural and fiscal capital than to expend huge wads of it on an already well-endowed institution.
And don't get me started on the Planetarium fiasco....