Michael Lee-Chin Crystal
Daniel Libeskind · Toronto, Canada · 2007
Daniel Libeskind’s Michael Lee-Chin Crystal inserts a cluster of sharply angled aluminum-and-glass volumes into the historic Royal Ontario Museum. The extension deliberately collides with the older masonry building, generating sloping interior walls, dramatic voids and an irregular new entrance along Bloor Street. Structural steel carries the crystalline forms without relying on conventional vertical stacking. Opened in 2007, the addition radically altered the museum’s public identity and became one of Canada’s most visible examples of early twenty-first-century deconstructivist architecture.