Studio Daniel Libeskind is on a roll. Less than a year after its addition to the Denver Art Museum opened to much popular fanfare, if lukewarm critical reviews, another of the firm’s big cultural projects has followed suit: a dramatic expansion of Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), which opened on Saturday. Though separated by 1,500 miles, the two buildings share Libeskind’s signature aesthetic of angular, crystalline forms. They also have in common a key gesture: a prow-shaped volume that reaches over public space. These similarities have led more than a few observers to wonder if the architect’s atelier is copying itself.
In Toronto, Libeskind’s new 175,000-square-foot wing—officially called the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal—faces the city’s premier shopping street and, in a contextual gesture that’s unusual for the architect, forges a connection between this thoroughfare and the original, more austere Beaux-Arts museum. “We were looking to create a lot of transparency and engagement with the city,” explains museum director William Thorsell. “Museums are typically built like fortresses, and we wanted a new, more urban presence.”
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