ROM finally finds key to right doors
The Royal Ontario Museum has returned to its senses and announced it will reopen its grand entrance on its Queen’s Park facade.
After 10 years of sending bewildered tourists to two shabby little glass sliding doors on Bloor St. W. at the base of a sticky-outy bit of the “Crystal” addition thing covered with slatted display wall from Canadian Tire, they will now enter by the doors every eye has been naturally drawn to since the main wing was opened in 1933.
This is basic stuff. The ROM’s revived doors will also be glass but they will be at the front. They will welcome you into the building with a pleasant sensation of “You were outside before but now you’re not,” the kind that repelled Daniel Libeskind, the architect best known for his pointy-wreckage style, who apparently saw the north side entrance to the 2007 addition as a statement.
But of what? That museum visitors were puny compared to his loud building, that they were surplus to requirements? It was a generic entrance with plain glass sliding doors, very Pearson Airport, very Home Depot Is Having a Sale on Glue Guns.
For 10 years, I felt I was sneaking into the ROM via a loading bay.
“Abandon hope, all ye who enter here,” I used to think on Sunday afternoons in January. Yes, that’s from Dante and it was basically the “you break it, you bought it” slogan over the gates of Hell. The Gardiner Museum across the street is plain-spoken and understated. It’s also beautiful. How did Libeskind get it so wrong?
The limestone steps at the revived Queen’s Park entrance will be heated so no one has to shovel — this Canadian thinks that’s grand — and presumably there will be the usual gaggle of kids getting off yellow schoolbuses while their names are checked off by exasperated teachers; that never changes. There will be greenery and architectural light- ing, and best of all, direct access to Museum subway station.
The project will be paid for with $1.5 million from the provincial government and a donation from the W. Garfield Weston Foundation. It’s money wellspent to correct a mistake that should never have been made, a small admirable way of marking Canada’s 150th birthday. I do love the ROM.
The basic manual of American architecture, A Pattern Language, which guides non-experts on how to design and build — please consult it before you enclose your front porch — has a short, crisp section on main entrances, whether in a small home or a grand building. When you approach a structure, it advises, you should get a visual hint about where to enter it.
The ROM is not a sensory deprivation tank. It’s a public building, an institution devoted to many things, one of them being to teach children to love science, history and art in a vivid tactile way rather than in the abstract. It is not supposed to look like a generic condo showroom, calculated not to offend buyers or startle them in any way.
People who love brutalism love that Libeskind addition, I suspect because they see a flat blank facade as giving them a stage for personal grandeur. The boyish self-love of starchitects and their acolytes is what drove them to design their glass-tower-with-a-twist buildings.
It’s Marilyn Monroe, a shard, a walkietalkie, a hammer, a sail, creating what the liveable-cities architect Jan Gehl calls “perfume bottle skylines.” But inside, there’s always that feeling of sterility, what Tom Wolfe in his salad days called the terrible “whiteness & lightness & leanness & cleanness & bareness & sparseness of it all.”
You can advise people not to install glass stair railings in their homes — I envision people ripping them out en masse in 2025 — because they were the 1970s Harvest Gold fridge and stove of 2015, but they won’t listen. Architects design buildings to be of their time, but the trick is to design them for when they’re past their time too.
In 2008, as Christopher Hume wrote then, it became clear that the ROM addition’s angled glass and aluminum would absorb sunlight and create huge, dangerous icicles. When did it become clear that the ROM was going to need a bigger door? Probably on opening day in 2007.
Ten years later they’re letting us back in with a flourish and I am glad.
The ROM is not supposed to look like a generic condo showroom, calculated not to offend buyers or startle them in any way