Royal Ontario Museum extension
The Royal Ontario Museum is a learning and exhibition centre as well as an important educational facility for many schools in and around Toronto. It consists of several buildings constructed between the 1920s and the 1980s, and in the summer of 2007, a new building extension will be completed. Designed by Daniel Libeskind this is a self-supporting structure that gently interferes with the historic buildings it embraces. Still it has a daring but ingenious design. Known also by the name of The Lee-Chin Crystal, it’s a composition of five interlocking volumes with hardly 2 perpendicular surfaces or right angles. That’s why the frame, which serves as a support for the aluminum façade, took two years to construct. On the inside this sloping walls create amazing spaces with such ingenious details as the Spirit House, a void at the heart of the building that is traversed by criss-crossing bridges. Windows create framed views which, apart from lightening the interior space, give unique glances at the city outside. On the inside, small or large sections, reveal the old building’s facades.
The architect managed to create a higly abstract building which links old and new in a dialog between details: windows are retreated into the volume, keeping the same plane appearence as the old ones, proportions are kept even if right angles dissapear and the entire new building seems to grow from the ground, leaving the impresion of a solid bound with the soil, just like the heavy stone buildings do.
The main material, anodized aluminum, which covers tree quarters of the facade is manufactured by the same company who worked with Gehry at The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.
[…] New photos of Libeskind’s Royal Ontario Museum. It looks as interesting as expected, or maybe even more. The building will be inaugurated in June 2007. The initial article here. […]