Here’s a quick link to my piece in this week’s European and Asian editions of Time about Daniel LIbeskind’s new addition to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. (The piece isn’t appearing in the U.S. because I just wrote a fairly long one about Libeskind that appeared in Time last October, when his addition to the Denver Art Museum opened.)
In my piece, which is mostly enthusiastic, I call Libeskind’s buildings polemical. And polemics inspire strong responses. They’ve already started. In the Globe and Mail, architecture critic Lisa Rochon doesn’t like the thing one bit. And to think, ROM Director William Thorsell, prime mover behind the LIbeskind addition, used to be editor of that paper. Ouch.
Rochon’s piece is a completely over the top in its charge that Libeskind is acting out his anger the experiences of his family in the Holocaust, but that aside she makes what will be the standard case against the ROM building by the people — and there will be plenty of them — who find it completely indigestable.