Rod Robbie designed Skydome
Architect mortgaged his home to enter competition he won
Roderick Robbie, the architect who designed the Skydome and was part of the team that designed the renowned Canadian pavilion at Expo 67, died Wednesday morning at St. Michael’s Hospital, which he started to redesign from his deathbed a few days ago. He was 83.
“There’s no question that his work was his life in many ways. He never stopped being the architect. Even when he was in hospital in the last week,” his son, Angus Robbie, said on Wednesday night.
“At some point he overheard some of the professionals say St. Mike’s was going to be developing a new facility, and he wanted to get his firm that work. So, while he’s a patient, he’s trying to do a building footprint analysis to try to figure out how they can change the layout of the block at Bond St. to get more footprint so they can get a bigger building. And it’s like, ‘Oh my goodness.’ But that made him happy.”
Robbie’s office, Angus said, was “like a blizzard of paper and ideas — tons of stuff written out.” In a 1998 Star column, Robbie’s former business partner, the late Colin Vaughan, wrote: “There’s always been a touch of a loveable, agitated, mad scientist about Robbie.”
“It’s all arms and legs akimbo, lots of loud talk and a bearded, slightly rumpled air to match the big ideas. Once, during a turbulent personal period, Robbie just sat down and wrote a 750-page, self-published book on the meaning of life. Nothing is too big a challenge,” Vaughan wrote. The Skydome, now the Rogers Centre, is an engineering marvel that has been criticized since it opened in 1989. Robbie — who mortgaged his Moore Park home to obtain the cash he needed to enter the stadium design competition — defended the building in a 2009 interview. The general public, he said, has always liked it, even if other architects didn’t. “There was a lot of bitchy criticism of the design, most of which didn’t take into account the budgetary constraints, which were extremely severe. Nobody can quite believe that, I know. But all of this had never been done before. Let’s face it, it was an experiment,” he said. Robbie, an Officer of the Order of Canada, was chairman emeritus of Robbie Young + Wright/ibi Group Architects. He became ill in November, Angus said, and died of an obstruction of blood flow to his small bowel. Predeceased by his wife Enid, an artist and historian, he is survived by his four children. Robbie and his wife became activists after immigrating to Canada from England in 1956. They were founding members of Canada’s movement to ban nuclear arms. Angus said Robbie was especially proud of his work on the Canadian pavilion, known as Katimavik, for the Montreal Expo in 1967.