44% more visitors, and a decade of architectural arguments
The Royal Ontario Museum
Canada's largest museum added a jagged glass-and-metal crystal to its 1914 building in 2007 — one of the most polarizing pieces of architecture in Toronto, and one of its most effective.
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The Royal Ontario Museum — Canada's largest museum, covering natural history, world cultures and art under one roof — spent nearly a century as a fairly conventional heritage building before adding one of the most argued-about pieces of architecture in the city.
Founded in 1912, opened in 1914
The ROM was created by a special act of the Ontario legislature in 1912 and opened to the public on March 19, 1914, growing over the following decades into one of the largest and most comprehensive museums in North America.
The Crystal (2007)
In 2007, the museum unveiled the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal, a jagged addition of five interlocking, glass-and-aluminum-clad volumes designed by architect Daniel Libeskind and inspired by the crystalline forms in the ROM's own mineralogy collection. Its deliberately tilted walls and irregular window patterns burst directly out of the museum's original heritage stonework — an intentional, jarring contrast rather than a sympathetic extension.
Controversial, and effective
The Crystal was, and remains, genuinely divisive among Torontonians and architecture critics alike — but by the numbers it worked: visitor attendance rose 44% in its first year, and the addition added 100,000 square feet of new exhibition space, a new main entrance, and street-level retail, transforming what critics had previously described as the museum's fortress-like public face.
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Sources
- The Canadian Encyclopedia — Royal Ontario Museum
- Studio Libeskind — Royal Ontario Museum
- Wikipedia — Royal Ontario Museum