Monday, December 28, 2009


The Washington Post crowns ROM the worst piece of...architecture in the world.


The Michael Lee-Chin Crystal. Sure, there were a lot of Wal-Marts thrown up in the Aughts, but Daniel Libeskind's addition to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto surpasses the ugliness of bland functional buildings by being both ugly and useless. His aluminum-and-glass-clad crystalline forms grow out of the building's original 1914 structure, and from the street it's dramatic. But go inside and you need a map to move around its irrational and baffling dead spaces.

And where do you put art in a room of canted walls? Curators seem as baffled and frustrated by it as casual visitors. And it cost only $250 million.


(article via blogTO)

I'm not terribly fond of it.
It does look like something dropped on the building from outer space.
But, it's also typical of Toronto architecture.
Screw up the old beyond repair rather than to restore.