Our two favourite arts megaprojects continue their inevitable if not somewhat achingly slow progress towards completion. Contrasting these two work-in-progress images reveals much about the conceptual and even philosophical underpinnings of the projects. The ROM's Crystal, clearly, is about a figure-ground relationship with the city where the object stands in sharp contrast with its context. The choice of construction cam vantage points plays off the otherness of the crystal that is - now that I reflect on it - somewhat like a diamond on a ring. It represents a historically significant cultural engagement bound by a traditional celebration of the object. There is a coolness here dictated by standing back and looking with - we hope - appreciation. The museum of artifacts.

Contrast that view to the AGO's webcam. Like the gallery itself the construction image is one of a constantly changing fabric of activity and process within the context of a neighbourhood that is a column of extremes from Victorian homes to ethnic shopping centres to the chaos of Queen Street. The AGO's choice of architect and the means by which they arrived at this design solution is, not surprisingly, like the thing itself. There is a tumble of cultural processes bound together not by one specific iconographic form but by a collection of internal solutions that punch through the building's envelope in a myriad of different ways. This building, when complete, will be about experiencing an ongoing cultural dialogue with the artists, curators, and designers who help define the city we inhabit. In a way it is the progeny of Wright's New York Guggenheim which made art part of a spiraling procession down an off-ramp. Here that procession is made far more complex and multivalent through the use of advanced visualization technologies as well as the creative vision of the designers. There will be less standing back in the AGO. The museum of cultural process.

So, there it is. The observation of two construction webcams reveals much about who we think we are and where we are going. Which - and I ask this question only to prompt discussion - is the better solution?

1. The ROM is sexier today but I’m not sure how long that will last. The jury is out on the AGO. My fingers are crossed.

   Posted by Miss T  on  08/04  at  02:52 PM
3. If the AGO project is interesting because it emphasizes process (Bruce Mau's 'Massive Change' exhibit being only one of many such markers), the ROM crystal strikes me as more meaningful because it enfolds not only process but intelligible substance as well. The AGO site offers little sense of its planning or design, and this absence produces not a sense of unfolding or breathless anticipation but instead a dulling ennui. One is tempted to view the project not as an improvement or expansion but as a remodelling for its own sake, a pointless display of money, time, and resources conspicuously consumed. The ROM crystal, on the other hand, is at once coherent and exuberant. Like a crystal, the building occurs midway between the chemical and the organic. The promise of the crystal has been evident throughout its long unfolding. In his essay 'Building Dwelling Thinking' the German phenomenologist Martin Heidegger observes that a structure such as a bridge (or, in this case, the ROM crystal) gathers the elements of its environment together into a locale, and that only in such a space where room is made for things to unfold is dwelling possible. In the case of a bridge, the bed and banks of a river are joined together. In the case of the ROM crystal, the structure joins the city's regular and chaotic elements, its order, its rectangularity, with its organic nature, its beginnings and unfoldings. The ROM crystal opens up not only the ROM but also the entire city for familiar as well as entirely new kinds of dwelling.
   
   Posted by Amy Lavender Harris  on  {comment_date format=’%m/%d’}  at  {comment_date format=’%h:%i %A’}
Posted by Amy Lavender Harris  on  08/04  at  05:48 PM

4. Robert Ouellette’s observations on the ROM and AGO construction sites are both intelligent and provocative. Having followed these projects closely for several years and having recently written an essay on the Gehry-designed, AGO transformation (“Frank Gehry: Seeing the AGO Again [and Again]” in the AGO book, FRANK GEHRY: Toronto, edited by Dennis Reid), I will add a few comments.

   Frank Gehry and Daniel Libeskind are both, in the best sense, artist-architects. To fully understand what each is doing with their creations in Toronto, one must track back through their work over the past 35 years.

   For example, with Libeskind, it is quite informative (and rewarding) to look at drawings, collages, and three-dimensional constructions that he did during 1970-81, while in Toronto, then Cranbrook. They feel like the ROM “wanting to be.” During that period, in an essay titled “END SPACE” (Libeskind: Between Zero and Infinity, Rizzolii, 1981, pp 80-81), he stated: “An architectural drawing is as much a prospective unfolding of future possibilities as it is a recovery of a particular history to whose intentions it testifies and whose limits it always challenges.” Indeed,Libeskind’s “intuition of geometric structure” that is taking shape, now, at the ROM, was fully predicted in 1981 and earlier.

   As for Gehry and the AGO, two quick points: 1) the “surgery” currently underway will make way for two incredibly bold moves that will be very powerful: the glazed, 425-foot long Douglas fir-structured sculpture promenade along Dundas; and the pale-blue titanium “box” (with its snake-like stairs) lifted above Grange Park that will “converse” with the hovering OCAD box on the east side of the park, and 2)to fully understand what Gehry is doing with the AGO, one should carefully study a drawing of the full, north-south architectural section (which I included in my recent essay for the AGO’s Gehry book, p. 39). His extraordinary, horizontal-to-vertical, village-like spatial intricacy for the AGO is fully revealed in this drawing.

   Moreover, a fish-folly design that Gehry did in 1983 (see p. 50 in my essay) seems to embody the mystery and power that, some 25 years later, will be released at the AGO.

   Larry Wayne Richards, University of Toronto

   Posted by  on  08/06  at  10:47 AM

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