The first time my daughter saw the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal she said it looked as if an asteroid had struck the Royal Ontario Museum and got lodged in the roof. Or was it the side? I can’t remember, but then it’s hard to tell which is the roof and which is the side. Nevertheless, my daughter is a teacher and I respect her opinion.
Ever since the Crystal, as it’s called, was unveiled I kept wondering if I was the only one who thought it was hideous. But an international organization called VisualTourist has ranked the latest addition to Canada’s largest museum as no. 8 on its list of the ten ugliest buildings in the world.
As a Toronto native, I have many fond memories of the ROM. When I was a little boy, the dinosaurs were my favourite exhibit. My parents would take me, and the visit would end at the gift shop with new additions to my fossil collection. The ROM was part of my childhood.
In the ‘80s, I wrote for a magazine called Key to Toronto. The October 1982 issue had my piece about the ROM’s ongoing renovations – a new curatorial centre and new terrace galleries, including an expanded reptile gallery. These renovations comprised the second major makeover for the ROM, and would last for years, but it was still the ROM. The ROM opened in 1912 and, as the literature says, was built in the Italianate Neo-Romanesque style with arched windows, decorative eave bracks, quoins, and cornices. This means the stone building was stately and traditional, and had a certain presence at the southwest corner of Bloor Street and Queens Park Crescent. That is a major intersection right across the street from a number of University of Toronto buildings, and near the Yorkville area with its shops, boutiques, and dining establishments.
The 1933 expansion of the ROM included the Byzantine-style rotunda with its ornate mosaic ceiling. The rotunda was the main entrance until the thing happened. Today that grandiose rotunda with the magnificent ceiling and circular structure that brought European-style classicism to a once bland North American city is largely abandoned. Instead, visitors must come through the Crystal.
Today I’m a member of the ROM and have to walk by the Crystal whenever I come to hear a lecture or see an exhibit. It was there when I took in four lectures related to the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit. It was there when I attended a Munk Debate on aid to Africa. It’s there every time I go for a walk around Queens Park Crescent and Bloor Street.
It is a monstrosity, and not just ugly, because ugly is a simple word and this is anything but simple. It is complicated, convoluted, and con-everything that is beautiful and sensible. I used to think the ugliest building in Toronto was the John Robarts Library. The reference library for the U of T is a disjointed structure of uneven proportions, sort of a three-dimensional ink blot without the symmetry. But next to the Crystal, the Robarts Library is the Taj Mahal.
The Crystal emerges from the ground like a metallic mushroom on steroids, its lines going off in all directions with no rhyme or reason. It rises out of the sidewalk like a cancerous tumor that renders the patient into a state of comatose terminitis. The fruit-explosion muffin from Tim Hortons has nothing on this glass-aluminum asterisk that could be a freeze-frame moments after the atomic blast to end the world. Don’t tell me about its deployment of shapes and geometry or the interlocking prismatic forms that turn the entire museum complex into a luminous beacon.
The Michael Lee-Chin Crystal – and I give cudos to the guy for donating all that money – is an abomination of the worst kind when free spirits who think they’re creative go off on a tangent and drag the community down with them.
For $270 million, the powers that be at the ROM gave us the Crystal with its in-your-face, American-style ego that, for all intents and purposes, destroyed the ROM. How dare they besmirch my memories of this once beautiful edifice. So here’s my idea. Tear the thing down and start over. Millions of people, especially those in Toronto, will say thank you.
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