Torontoist » “Daniel Libeskind”

Off Key Comedy Aims to Fuse Stand-Up and Song

Chris Dart — Thu, 23 May 2013 18:15:44 +0000

A musical-comedy showcase tries to shake the genre's lame reputation.

Even with the success of acts like Lonely Island and Flight of the Conchords, people still tend to view musical comedy with some suspicion, and not without reason. Those high-profile success stories aside, at the club level, musical comedy is too often the province of people who aren’t quite good enough to make it as musicians, but not quite funny enough to make it as comedians.

Two local comics, Robert Keller and Rush Zilla, are out to change that perception with their show, Off Key Comedy, which features a wide variety of acts whose only commonality is that they combine music and comedy in one form or another. The third edition of the monthly show will take place on May 23, at Comedy Bar.

Of a Monstrous Child is Caught in a Complex Romance with Lady Gaga

Carly Maga — Thu, 23 May 2013 15:00:29 +0000

Alistair Newton's new play dives into the history of performance art to explain our cultural fascination with the House of Gaga.

Despite the fact that the last show in Buddies in Bad Times Theatre’s 2012/2013 season is titled Of a Monstrous Child: A Gaga Musical, Lady Gaga herself takes a secondary role. There are no homages to raw-meat dresses and gold-plated wheelchairs here. Instead, writer and director Alistair Newton uses the House of Gaga as a pathway into the history of the notable performance-art stars that came before her in the pantheon of queer iconography, and how she is and isn’t a construct of all of them put together.

Twin Showcases at the TIFF Bell Lightbox Herald Student Filmmakers

Kevin Scott — Wed, 22 May 2013 16:30:46 +0000

TIFF presents a night of films by directors who are still in high school or university.

It’s entirely possible that an early work by the next Atom Egoyan or David Cronenberg will screen on Wednesday night at the TIFF Bell Lightbox. With the 2013 Student Film Showcase featuring the best from post-secondary schools around the country and the Next Wave Presents: Jump Cuts Young Filmmakers Showcase kicking off the evening with Toronto-area high-school students’ films, the night will be a coming-out party for a new crop of talent. Judging by the polished creativity of some of the entries, it’s safe to say that young people are more prepared than ever to start telling stories on film from an early age.

In Defense of the Crystal, by Michael Boughn

Michael Boughn (Guest Contributor) — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 17:55:00 +0000

Stairs inside the ROM (top) and the AGO (bottom).

It crashed into Bloor Street more than three years ago, but the Royal Ontario Museum’s Crystal is no less controversial than when it was unveiled. Now, on the eve of the retirement of William Thorsell, writer Michael Boughn reconsiders the jagged, jutting structure that—for better or worse—serves as the outgoing ROM director and CEO’s legacy.

As the two big Toronto renovation projects of the decade—Frank Gehry’s renovation of the AGO and Daniel Libeskind’s of the ROM—continue to square off and duke it out for pride of place in Toronto’s architectural renaissance, the match increasingly seems to be going to the homeboy. Gehry’s transformation of the AGO has been by anyone’s measure a roaring success. It is impossible to find a negative word about the lyrical metamorphosis of the stodgy old Art Gallery of Ontario. “Gentle,” “self-possessed,” “masterly,” “supple,” “stunning,” and “enchanting” are just a few of the accolades awarded Gehry. Unless you consider the word “modest” (as in a “modest masterpiece”) to be negative, the judgment is unequivocal.
Libeskind’s contribution to the new Toronto, on the other hand, has been pummeled against the ropes.

Although Condé Nast Traveller listed the Crystal as one of the seven new wonders of the architectural world, most critics have demurred, to put it politely. In response to Condé Nast, Toronto architect Thomas Payne called the Crystal “the commodification of architecture.” Other critics were even less kind. The epithets that piled up against the jagged eruption on Bloor Street included “ugly,” “useless,” “irrational,” “baffling,” “grandstanding,” “dead,” “histrionic,” “amok” (as in “run amok,” a phrase usually reserved for invading Vikings or Montreal Canadiens fans), and from Toronto’s own Lisa Rochon, “the building most likely to come down in the next twenty years.” (Ironically, Gehry’s building experienced the same problems with moisture direly predicted for the ROM.) The contrast is fascinating and complicated.
Architects seem to have three main criticisms of Libeskind’s building, some of which are echoed in negative popular responses. Libeskind has been accused of violating certain technical necessities having to do with the uses of stairs and so on—concerns of interest to architects but not so much to the rest of us. He has also been condemned for repackaging design elements. Most frequently, architects will point out the similarities between the Crystal and Libeskind’s new Denver museum, with a footnote reference to the Jewish Museum in Berlin. Crystals all, they say. This is posed as an aesthetic problem, a lack of originality. It is also suggested, even by those like Thomas Payne who praise it, that Libeskind is simply marketing a commodity (as if “novelty” wasn’t the beating heart of commodity culture) rather than building structures that, as they like to say, respond to their context. Perhaps most damning is the criticism that the new spaces are impossible to display things in.
A number of questions come to mind in the face of these seemingly universal criticisms. For instance, are Gehry’s curvilinear designs any less composed of signature elements than Libeskind’s angular crystals? Why are his ubiquitous curves okay when Libeskind’s crystalline angles are suspect? Is it easier to identify an angle than a curve? Or is it just easier to like Gehry’s intense lyricism than Libeskind pointed anti-lyricism because it’s less, say, grating, or even, possibly, challenging? And what does it mean to raise the issue of something called “originality” at the beginning of the twenty-first century, a hundred years after Marcel Duchamp, among many others, decisively put the boots to it? And, assuming it wasn’t sheer incompetence, why would someone design such odd and difficult spaces? There are no unequivocal answers to these questions, but the fact that no one is asking them points to a deeper problem in the discussion of the relative merits of the buildings—that in the rush to judgment, no one seems very curious about what Libeskind is actually up to.
No one, for instance, has bothered to ask what a museum is and what it does, other than display things.

Looking up inside the ROM (top) and the AGO (bottom).

Everyone seems quite satisfied to sail along under the assumption that the museum is a benign and salutary cultural institution, kind of like public libraries and big, green parks. We take our families on Sunday to have fun in the bat cave (finally reinstated at the ROM, thank goodness) and the dinosaur hall, and, more importantly, to expose them to culture. By “culture,” we mean the history of civilization as it is embodied in the organized collections of art, artifacts, and specimens that are displayed for our universal edification.
But the museum, like everything else in the world, has a history, and, whatever else it is, it is not innocent. We may prefer to ignore that history, given its roots in what we now see as our unsavory colonial past. Libeskind, on the other hand, seems to think it is important to draw attention to it.
Most obvious is his inclusion of curiosity cabinets in the walls of the grand stairway. The museum as we know it arose out of similar curiosity cabinets—the collections of royalty and wealthy men in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Those private collections were made available only to a few privileged people, and were grounded on a notion of a world made up of singular wonders. The museum transformed those private collections of singular wonders into public collections of representative specimens, a change that marked the rise of our modern world.
The British Museum, one of the world’s first great museums, was established in 1753. Rather than displaying singular curiosities, the museum displayed objects arranged according to scientific taxonomies and hierarchies of knowledge. The world was changing rapidly in the eighteenth century. The whole idea of something called “the public” (as opposed to something called “the peasantry” or “the aristocracy”) was new, working its way into the culture, giving birth to new institutions and modes of life meant to serve it and contain it. Six years after opening, these displays were eventually presented for the edification of this new “public.”
What the public saw was the loot brought back from Europe’s colonial adventures. It was stored, studied, and displayed in the museum. The “Elgin” marbles, Zulu ritual drums, Egyptian Third Kingdom funerary urns, unknown species of beetles and butterflies, Kwakiutl baskets: all of it was part of an immense harvesting of the world. As to what to do with the harvest, another new institution—science—had the answer: box it. Egypt over there in that box, Greece over here in a different box, the past in boxes of chronological order. Boxes of the primitive, boxes of the ancient, boxes of the contemporary, all laid out to demonstrate the progression of one to the next. Boxes of fossils, boxes of butterflies, boxes of watches—time itself contained in a box.
There were boxes called display cases, bigger boxes called rooms, and even bigger boxes called wings. Even more important were the boxes of knowledge that located the objects in meaningful relations within these spatial boxes. Boxes within boxes within boxes. “The birth of the museum,” historian Tony Bennett points out, “was coincident with, and supplied a primary institutional condition for, the emergence of a new set of knowledge—geology, biology, archeology, anthropology, history, and art history.” Each of those new knowledges was displayed as a box in relation to other boxes, and the result was a totalized knowledge of the world that was contained within the precincts of the museum, which stood at the pinnacle of the process.
In that sense, the museum became material proof of the superiority of European culture, its treasure house, at the moment it literally possessed the world, contained it. The new architectures of display presented these materials flayed, pinned, and lined up in orderly presentations in rectilinear spaces that encoded significances beyond the mere visible objects. The physical orders of the halls and the cases they contained revealed the order of nature, the order of human progress, the order of knowledge that was fundamental to the emerging culture of modernity. Grouping artifacts according to nations and national schools displayed not only the artifacts, but “nation-ness” itself, as if it were “natural.” Displaying artifacts in terms of the progress of humanity, from primitive to civilized, naturalized “progress” as a given fact—as well as located its pinnacle in the culture that collected and interpreted the artifacts and created the display before which the spectator stood.

Outside the ROM (top) and the AGO (bottom).

One thing Libeskind’s building does, then, and does with real zest, is explode out of the smugness of this cultural configuration. It explodes onto Bloor Street—talk about responding to your context. Many people express discomfort with this architectural assertion, but perhaps they are supposed to feel discomfort. At the very least it disrupts—I would say enlivens—what always seemed one of the most pretentious, undistinguished, nineteenth-century colonial corners in Toronto. Between the old Anglican church, the “grand” Hyatt hotel, the neo-classical Department of Household Sciences (where women in the University of Toronto learned how to clarify soup and other subjects “related to their role”—now an upscale clothing store), and the undistinguished beaux-arts façade of the museum, Bloor and Avenue roads exuded the colonial complacency associated with Orange parades and dry Sundays.
Throughout his renovation, Libeskind stripped off the surfaces that hid the museum’s history beneath the appearance of some fictional, unassailable totality. The curiosity cabinets are one such gesture. Another is the revelation of the seams where various other renovations joined the original building over the years. The illusion of a single, seamless, monumental structure is gone. More important, however, is the way he explodes the complacency of the interior spaces. Michel Serres, the French philosopher of science, has suggested that we need to start thinking of knowledge in terms of sacks rather than boxes. Libeskind may not go quite that far, but there is nary a box to be found in his new spaces.
This refusal of the Crystal’s galleries to succumb to the old museum’s demand for manageable space—space that can easily be integrated into hidden taxonomies, categorizations, and hierarchies of knowledge—is in fact its most important contribution. As the presenter of culture, the museum is not some neutral container. Its mode of presentation is absolutely complicit in a hidden affirmation of European modernity’s organization of the world. The resistance implicit in the Crystal’s spaces may very well have as much to do with the Holocaust as the Berlin museum does, given the way modernity’s modes of thinking were used to enable that horror, and goes some way toward revealing the nature of the “one project” Libeskind says he is working on. Those spaces are a constant reminder that the world cannot be neatly contained in the museum—or anywhere else. In that sense, they will continue to recall us to the often uncomfortable, indigestible complexity of the world that too often we would prefer to ignore.
Michael Boughn is a writer who lives in Toronto. Cosmographia: a post-Lucretian faux micro-epic is forthcoming from Book Thug in November. His first mystery novel, Business As Usual, will be published by NeWest Press in 2011. He has been teaching courses in American and post-modern literature at U of T since 1993.
Photos by Michael Chrisman/Torontoist.

Anything but Crystal Clear

David Fleischer — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 13:00:00 +0000

The Royal Ontario Museum’s Michael Lee-Chin Crystal may or may not be one of the ugliest architectural feats known to humankind, but there’s one thing we can all agree on: original, it ain’t.
Las Vegas is usually a bit outside our jurisdiction, but we couldn’t help but do a double-take when the latest super-duper-megaresort (pictured above) opened there last week.
The $8.5-billion CityCenter is billed as the biggest private construction project in U.S. history. Spread across sixty-seven acres, it’s got hotels, casinos (of course), condos, and “Crystals,” a bourgeois mall that looks eerily like Toronto’s custom-made, $250-million landmark museum addition.
Given that the ROM was recently cited as one of the planet’s ugliest buildings by both Virtualtourist.com and the Washington Post, we’re not sure if we should take this personally or not.

We thought the resemblance was a bit weird since, according to architect Daniel Liebeskind’s own website, Toronto’s crystal was “inspired by the ROM’s gem and mineral collection [and he] sketched the concept on paper napkins while attending a family wedding at the ROM.” But when the Star‘s Richard Ouzounian talked to Libeskind last week, Ouzounian posed a rather obvious question: how is it that a Las Vegas mall could, from a presumably different inspiration, end up with the same raison d’être, not to mention the same moniker? Liebeskind’s answer: the name was the owners’ idea.
The Post‘s Philip Kennicott piped in that the ROM is worse than a Wal-Mart in that it “surpasses the ugliness of bland functional buildings by being both ugly and useless.” Ouch. Sticking the knife in, he also says that Vegas’ Crystals “may be one of the architect’s best buildings, as if the shopping mall—not the museum—was the métier he’s been searching for all along.”
Hmmmm. We have to think about that a moment. Is that, like, a backhanded compliment?
Okay, you say. So, it looks the same from the outside. But ours is a museum, this just a mall. It surely can’t contain the same blank, angular interiors that make the new dino exhibit so cool….can it?
Judge for yourself, friend. From where we sit, the hallway outside Louis Vuitton looks just as familiar as the exterior streetscape gracing the Vegas strip.
Now, in fairness, Libeskind likes crystals and that’s okay. He became a full-on starchitect with Berlin’s Jewish Museum, where the zig-zagging, shard-like construction actually conveys something.
When it was announced that he would work on the ROM, we had reason to hope for a lot. While the AGO was touting Frank Gehry‘s childhood connection to the work he was doing there, Libeskind had some Toronto cred of his own: his wife, Nina, is Stephen Lewis’s sister, making him a bona fide black-suit-wearing part of Toronto’s lefty elite.
When the ROM design emerged some thought it was bold and brilliant, while others said it was just him imposing his aesthetic on a historic structure. The original design has a lot more glass and a lot less metal, but few changed their opinions when the thing opened, and that’s fine; if art isn’t a bit controversial, if people aren’t talking about it, what’s the point?
We don’t begrudge artistes the right to explore the same themes over and over again—for John Irving to write about bears and people losing limbs, for Steven Spielberg to make movies about kids and/or aliens, for Snoop Dogg to rap about bein’ a pimp who likes the pot. We’d even expect Frank Gehry to go wild with big, swooping piles of titanium, except that most people agree the reason the AGO works is because he didn’t…
Anyway, what we’re really saying to Libeskind is: Come on, man. Build what you’ve gotta build but don’t bullshit a bullshitter.
And he isn’t done with Toronto yet, as the L Tower bumbles along. Will its doppelganger one day dot the skyline of some other burg? Let’s hope not.
All images from CityCenter’s website.

To Boldly Go Where No Museum Has Gone Before

Stephen Michalowicz — Mon, 25 May 2009 14:00:00 +0000

Image courtesy of the ROM.

On Friday, as part of Doors Open, the ROM hosted “The Bold Museum”: an informal discussion between Kenton Vaughan (the director of The Museum, a documentary on the construction of the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal) and Kelvin Browne (the author of Bold Visions: The Architecture of the Royal Ontario Museum). We had high hopes for the event, as the ROM’s transformation is beautifully explored in Browne and Vaughan’s work, but instead of sharing their knowledge, the two spent the night discussing the merits of their creations, rather than the substance of them.
The presentation part of the evening was only saved by Browne and Vaughan’s anecdotes about Daniel Libeskind, the crystal’s lead architect, and his giant ego. According to Browne, after Bold Visions was published, the museum hosted a book signing with Libeskind and himself. There, Libeskind, in top form, happily chatted up the book’s merits and signed dozens of copies, before revealing to Browne that he had never even read it. Both Browne and Vaughan seemed to agree that Libeskind, while brilliant, was somewhat of a pompous phony. “He’s amazingly poetic,” laughed Browne. “But a lot of what he says doesn’t make sense.” Like us, the audience also enjoyed hearing about Libeskind’s foibles and responded with roars of laughter every time the world-renowned architect was roasted.
Even after two years, though, the crystal can still induce rage. The most dramatic part of the evening came at the end of the question-and-answer period, when a man at the back of the crowd leapt to his feet and demanded that the hosts justify the crystal’s high cost. Several other audience members also voiced their disdain. We felt sorry for Browne and Vaughan, as they were treated like the crystal’s creators instead of its historians. When he was designing the crystal, Libeskind said that he wanted a building that would evoke controversy and discussion and stay in the public’s minds for years to come; it looks like, for better or worse, he got his wish.

Avant Garde For Thee

Jonathan Goldsbie — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 22:15:00 +0000

If writing about music is like dancing about architecture, then there’s probably no easy way to write about dancing choreographed to music composed about architecture. Except, perhaps, by making comparisons to movies.

On Thursday evening, the ROM held its The Night of the Avant Garde gala to celebrate the completion of the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal with the North American premiere of Music Space Reflection by British contemporary composer Simon Bainbridge, a piece jointly commissioned by the ROM and Manchester’s Imperial War Museum North to pay to tribute to the work of Daniel Libeskind. Performed by twenty-four members of Toronto’s CONTACT contemporary music ensemble, distributed equally among four platforms throughout the atrium and amplified by two dozen precisely-arranged speakers, the experience was a bath in shimmering dissonance, like standing in the middle of the sessions in which the BBC Orchestra and London Sinfonietta recorded Jonny Greenwood‘s There Will Be Blood score. (Also acceptable as an analogy: the minimalist portions of John Williams’s CE3K music, if one of the instruments was a shofar.) As Bainbridge conducted from a podium in the centre, and the trombonists achieved an innovative effect by playing into snare drums, Libeskind (left) wandered through the space—as everyone was encouraged to do but most were too timid to dare—proudly beaming, as if to say, “Yes, yes, this is exactly what I had in mind. I am awesome.”
Six tall and frighteningly skinny models, clad in fashions by local designer Ula Zukowska, paraded emotionlessly through the court all evening long but posed themselves in front of the elevators to perform something of a vaguely robotic dance during the first part of the piece. The food servers, too, were elaborately garbed and made up, with neon bands painted across their eyes (Blade Runner‘s Pris meets Boy George) some bowing or contorting in order to extend the avant-gardeness of the food — one item of which, a “crab bon bon,” was served in a sauce that tasted like if a coconut was thrown in the air and never came down — to the very act of presenting it. Complemented by the psychedelic and occasionally Naqoyqatsi-ish lighting and projections on the walls and ceiling, the gala’s ambitious conceit brought to mind a more charmingly passive-aggressive version of the sort of fête found in the Joel Schumacher Bat mans.
Following the performance of the twenty-five-minute work, a DJ took over, spinning startlingly well-selected tunes that not only reinforced the theme of the evening but served as sly comments, from Crystal Castles to Kraftwerk to an orchestral version of the same Kraftwerk song to the A Clockwork Orange version of “Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary,” before closing the evening with the American Beauty theme. While no vellocet, the “libations” (a word that never ceases to make us giggle) included the ROMtini and something called a Psychedelic, both of which were yummy enough but did not blow our minds as much as the Avant Garde, a martini which tasted like a glass of liquefied black pepper; while virtually undrinkable, it lived up to its name by very much expanding our conception of the possibilities of an entire state of matter.
Being a big fan of Leah Sandals’s treatises on museum accessibility, we considered our acceptance of the invitation to attend this gala to be almost an avant garde gesture in itself, an attempt to take ourselves outside of our comfort zone by seeing with our own eyes William Thorsell‘s conception of what a public museum should be. As the event was a $200-a-ticket fundraiser, it cannot at all be argued that such lavishness is responsible for the sharp increase of admission prices in the past year, but it was still sobering, on our way out, to notice the sign advising that ROM admission is only free for one hour a week, on Wednesdays from 4:30-5:30.
And if you ever wondered what an orchid tastes like, no they weren’t serving them, but getting in the spirit of the evening we tried (a petal of) one, anyway. It was leafy.
Photos by Jonathan Goldsbie.

Hero: The ROM Crystal (Exterior)

David Topping — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 20:46:00 +0000

Villain: The ROM Crystal (Interior)

Johnnie Walker — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 20:45:00 +0000

Torontoist is ending the year by naming our Heroes and Villains of 2007––the people, places, and things that we’ve either fallen head over heels in love with or developed uncontrollable rage towards over the past twelve months. Get your dose, starting Boxing Day and running into the new year, three times a day––sunrise, noon, and sunset.

From price hikes to bomb hoaxes, the ROM has been a constant news item this year. But while Thorarinn Jonsson’s silliness left us unburdened with tangible consequences, the same cannot be said for Daniel Libeskind’s Michael Lee-Chin Crystal, which is a mess our museum will be cleaning up for years. The exterior has divided the critics. Some praise its bold fusion of a modern structure with the existing edifice. Others compare it to a giant metal spider from space. But in focusing on whether the exterior of the building is a masterpiece or a disasterpiece, very little time has been spent discussing the interior. From the looks of things, very little money or planning went into that part of the Crystal. A confusing, artless layout and an abundance of cheap building materials make the Crystal’s insides slightly less appealing than an IKEA. The second you step inside the new entrance, you’re immediately shoved into a dimly lit coat check with a claustrophobically low ceiling. Things slightly improve after you enter the main atrium, although the juxtaposition of the new building’s starkness with the richly decorated older wings creates a comparison from which the Crystal does not profit.
For years, the ROM has complained about insufficient space, claiming the collection on display was the tip of an iceberg whose main body lay hidden in storage. Yet this new addition to the building adds little in terms of gallery space. Half of it has been used to house the new gift shop and restaurant, not to mention dubiously educational features such as the “Spirit House” or the “J.P. Driscoll Family Stair of Wonders,” which is a real missed opportunity. What could have been a jam-packed treasure trove of eclectic curiosities in the spirit of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum is instead just a big, white stairwell with a few toy soldiers and seashells shoved in the walls. While the Crystal’s interior windows and skylights are sometimes visually interesting, many of them provide unimpressive views and are already coated in an inch of dust. Does no one at the ROM have a Swiffer? The choice of white as the colour for everything means dirt, scuff marks and cracks in the walls are embarrassingly obvious. There is no reason “modern architecture” has to be synonymous with “crappily made.” Just look at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts with its gorgeous auditorium and lobby. Hopefully some of the kinks will be ironed out next year when the new galleries will all be fully up and running. Even so, too much of the inside of the Crystal renovation looks in need of, well, a renovation.
Photo by Marc Lostracco.

Transformation AGO

Beth Bohnert — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 15:59:00 +0000

Photo by marco 2000.
On Monday night, the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) hosted a members-only event to provide an inside look at its ongoing renovations before it shuts its doors to the public for its last phase (to be completed sometime in 2008). Dubbed “Transformation AGO,” and overseen by world-renowned architect Frank Gehry, the AGO is one of the final buildings to be completed as part of Toronto’s “Cultural Renaissance”.
Perhaps people are feeling a little hungover from the controversy of Daniel Libeskind’s ROM Crystal, but reactions to the AGO’s new design have been tepid at best, especially when it became evident early on that Toronto wasn’t getting its own Guggenheim Bilbao.
However, conversations with members of the AGO soon revealed that their approach to architectural rejuvenation was quite different from other “Renaissance” structures—most notably that of its glamorous older sister.

Initially, its planned “transformation” looks underwhelming—a jumble of rectangular structures that lack an overall theme, with Gehry’s spiral staircases stuck like barnacles onto the new five-storey tower.
However, a team of enthusiastic curators and volunteers soon put the design into context. The AGO itself is made up of a series of additions and expansions that occurred throughout the last century, resulting in its present cluttered appearance. Gehry’s original plan was to bulldoze the entire site and start anew, but the members of the AGO resisted: each addition had its own unique history and character that they were loath to part with, and except for the unfortunate loss of the recent Barton Myers addition, most of the original structure remains.
Reinstallation director Linda Milrod was also quick to mention how much effort was made to ensure the building did not negatively impact the surrounding community (including the creation of a neighbourhood “community consultation” group to contribute to the planning). At two storeys high, most of the structure will share the same horizontal plane as the Victorian row-houses that surround it, and the hockey arena tower will be no higher than the neighbouring Ontario College and Design (OCAD) building. She also stressed that no land was acquired for the renovation; it will not extend more than an inch beyond its historical boundaries.
And even though Gehry’s trademark gleaming, curvaceous forms may not be evident in the bones of the building, its circulatory system—the Baroque stairways, the glass-and-wood prow of the Galleria Italia, the titanium cladding on the tower—are unmistakably Gehry.
We got the impression that the AGO decided to concentrate its renovation on functionality rather than its appearance. For instance, the new entrance will be moved to the middle of the building off Dundas Street, allowing visitors to see straight through Walker’s Court into the old Grange (the AGO’s first home). Also, the gallery spaces have been reconfigured to flow around the court, providing visitors with a point of reference that the cavernous and labyrinthine old building sorely lacked. Perhaps the most innovative design is the glass-and-wood façade off Dundas street, which will both house the Galleria Italia sculptures and serve as a “rest stop” for visitors to enjoy a panoramic view of the city. Anyone who has ever visited the Met or the Louvre will appreciate the AGO’s solution to the risk of sensory overload.
A lot of AGO’s renovation choices work in pleasant counterpoint to Daniel Libeskind’s crystalline entity, which was foisted onto the city earlier this year. In the case of the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal, the point was clearly to create a monumental, internationally-identifiable artifact for the city. Libeskind was hand-picked for the project by ROM director William Thorsell and given free rein for his architectural vision, arguably to the detriment of the existing ROM building as well as the streetscape. In contrast is Gehry—who has similarly had the “starchitect” moniker thrown his way—who subordinated many of his own design preferences (he doesn’t do symmetry, which makes the new entranceway surprising) in response to the concerns of the AGO and the surrounding community. The ROM is bold and daring, the AGO retreating and reflective. The ROM is an expression of one man’s artistic ambition, the other the result of committee and consensus.
Toronto will have to wait and see whether Libeskind’s cantered angles and Spirit House voids will overwhelm or compliment the ROM exhibits, and whether the AGO’s traditional white walls and high ceilings will be aesthetically appropriate or depressingly conventional. Both institutions are scheduled to open with their permanent exhibits in place sometime in 2008.
Photo of wood model by davidcrow. Photo of front face of AGO by My TVC 15.

This Bird Has Flown

Jonathan Goldsbie — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 00:25:00 +0000

In a recent argument in favour of the heritage value of the Sam’s sign, the billboards in Yonge-Dundas Square were compared to “banner ad slots on a Web page” due to their ephemeral nature. Well, the same could be said of our cultural institutions.
The agenda of the June 25th meeting of City Council’s Executive Committee [PDF] contains a report recommending that the naming rights of the Hummingbird Centre be resold [PDF]:

The financial pledge from Hummingbird Communications Ltd. to the City of Toronto and the subsequent voluntary renaming by the City of the former O’Keefe Centre was cancelled earlier in 2006 pursuant to an agreement between Hummingbird Communications Ltd. and The Hummingbird Centre (the “Centre”). Subsequent to such agreement, Hummingbird Communications Ltd. was sold to OpenText and has since ceased to exist as a separate company.

Fair enough. But it continues:

This situation combined with the desire to raise funds [...] has led the Board of Directors of the Centre to pursue a new naming rights partner. After discussions with numerous potential naming partners, a company has been identified that is prepared to make the largest investment in the naming rights for the theatre as set forth in the confidential attachment.

And which company is that? Well, it’s “set forth in the confidential attachment.” So unless you’re a city councillor or a Hummingbird Centre board member, you aren’t allowed to know until it’s a done deal. It’s one thing for private corporations to behave in this way; if they want to rename a movie theatre after a bank or a sports stadium after a media conglomerate or a theatre after a camera company, they have every right to make short-sighted (and publicly unpopular) cash grabs. But for our own government to do it without even allowing a minimum opportunity for public input is shameful.
The Centre was originally built by the O’Keefe Brewing Company, which owned it from 1960 (its opening) until 1968, when they transferred ownership to what was then Metropolitan Toronto. In 1996, the naming rights were sold to software company Hummingbird Communications Ltd. for $5 million. Now they’re being offered to the highest bidder of the “over 360 companies” solicited by the marketing consultants of WAM: “Of the companies approached, WAM has identified the designated company as being the company interested in providing the greatest financial consideration in exchange for acquiring naming rights to the Theatre.”
Well, can we at least finally expect some degree of permanence?

The financial terms of the proposed naming rights agreement, for either the 10-year offer or the 20-year term, represent fair market value as the terms are comparable to other recent naming rights agreements which are discussed more fully in the confidential attachment.

So, really, they’re just renting the naming rights. And, what do you know, it’s apparently good value compared to “other recent naming rights agreements” about which they won’t tell us.
All of this to pay for a new Daniel Libeskind building that the Star thinks will be located in Winnipeg.
UPDATE (June 26): The high bidder, as it turns out, was Sony.
Photo by Ian Muttoo on Flickr.

A Night At The Museum

Marc Lostracco — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 14:20:00 +0000

We’ve shown you a tour of the inside, and today, Torontonians will get a chance to take a look at the ROM’s new addition themselves following the free street concert tonight on Bloor Street.
First-come, first-served timed tickets will be allocated starting at noon for admission into the empty Crystal, and admission is free until tomorrow. The public will be allowed into the ROM’s empty new galleries until June 10, when the Museum begins installation of the permanent collection. Tickets will be available at the south entrance with the red awning beside the former McLaughlin Planetarium.
The street concert is standing-room-only and begins at 8 p.m. on Bloor Street in front of the ROM and will run for about 75-minutes, wrapping-up with a light show finale featuring composer David Foster as part of the Luminato festival. Performers will include Deborah Cox, K’naan, Natalie McMaster, and opera star Isabel Bayrakdarian, with the evening hosted by Paul Gross and appearances by Governor-General Michaëlle Jean, David Suzuki, Michael Lee-Chin and architect Daniel Libeskind.
Photo by Olemang from the Torontoist Flickr pool.