History of the Dome in need of a home
Rod Robbie’s rich cache of architectural memorabilia languishes in a Leaside storage locker
The name SkyDome was eventually erased from the dome-shaped stadium beside the CN Tower, but it still adorns the miniature model architect Rod Robbie built in 1985.
For now, that mini SkyDome stands, albeit sideways, stuffed in a Leaside storage locker.
It has been four years since Robbie died, and his children are struggling to preserve their father’s legacy.
They want to see his models, papers and memorabilia archived and available to the public.
But talks have stalled with thinly stretched institutions who rely on the people donating the items to prepare them for preservation.
“We need help in figuring it out,” said Nicola Robbie, one of Rod’s three daughters. “There’s no mechanism within these organizations any more, because they’ve been gutted so much by various governments, to be able to accept this stuff unless it’s in some incredibly digestible form.”
She estimates it would take months of dedicated work to catalogue the collection, time the busy family doesn’t have.
The locker is filled with mementos of Robbie’s decades-long career, including work on the Canadian pavilion at Expo 67 and the artworks and writings of his wife, Enid Robbie, who died in 2001.
After their father’s death in 2012, Nicola and her siblings sold the family’s Moore Park home, distilling Robbies’ 46 years there to what could fit in a locker — a victory unto itself.
Rod and Enid grew up in the U.K. during the Second World War and lived in North America during the Cold War. The threat of destruction seemed constant. (One of Rod’s childhood homes in England remains thanks only to the corner pub that shielded other buildings from a bomb blast during the Blitz, Nicola said.)
This produced a couple obsessed with diligently keeping a record of civilization, for fear that it could be wiped out.
“Understanding what we are, who we are, what is the evidence that we’ve been here, and documenting that, was really important,” Nicola said. It’s important to many, it seems. Almost every day people call the Toronto Archives, offering donations such as family photographs and letters, says Michelle Bayle, the institution’s supervisor of collection management and standards.
“It’s kind of like triage,” Bayle said of wading through the offers. She’s looking for items that are worth saving and fit to save.
Papers from a wet basement, for example, would raise red flags.
“Whenever you take something on it becomes your responsibility, and you do have to take care of it for, basically, ever,” she said. Caroline Robbie Montgomery knows the storage locker is not up to archival snuff, and it adds to her ongoing concern.
“Some of those drawings, I worry that they’ll disintegrate and just be lost,” she said.
Though Bayle said she has talked to the Robbie family, an appraisal report, the first formal step in accepting such a donation, has not been started.
“The thing that donors don’t realize is it’s a huge amount of work for the archives to take on a great big donation,” Bayle said, speaking generally.
“We have limited resources and we have to make some pretty tough decisions.”
Services are springing up to try to fill the gap between donors swimming in stuff and public institutions grappling to collect it.
Simon Rogers started a private archival consulting company, Breadcrumbs, six years ago.
“In the past, the donor had a freer hand. If they had interesting material, more people would be jumping to say, ‘Yes, absolutely we’ll take it.’ ”
But in an era of slashed budgets, he said, the onus falls on donors to present their collections in the best possible light.
Linda Fraser, curator of the architecture archive at the University of Calgary, says architectural records tend to be large, adding to the challenge.
(The first collection her archive brought in filled 550 banker’s boxes and 850 drawing rolls.)
She is able to add two collections a year, but estimates she gets 10 donation offers in the same period.
“It has to be, often, justifiable to the university,” she said. “You have to make a case for bringing in a collection, so there would be research involved in deciding whether we collect things or not.”
For Caroline, Nicola and their two siblings, it’s not just the physical goods but also their personal stories that they want to share.
The SkyDome was actually a family project. Caroline served as her father’s interior designer, tasked in part with selecting the Astroturf colour. Nicola worked as his executive assistant.
And their brother, Angus Robbie, helped score and animate a film demonstrating the roof movement, during the competition phase.
“The four of us have the most collective knowledge about what these pieces are and their context and could definitely help whoever was to actually do the curatorial archiving of it,” Caroline said.
“It’s a really big frustration for us,” she added. “As a family, we would very much like to see our parents’ body of work shared.”