When Libeskind was announced as the winner a few weeks later, there was little surprise; word was that ROM director William Thorsell had favoured Libeskind. “He wanted the wow factor to put the ROM on the map. It was pre-ordained,” says Michael Miller, an architect and professor who was a member of the working group that chose the long-list of twelve candidates.
Libeskind wasn’t a celebrity at the time. Only three of his designs had been built, but one of them, the Jewish Museum in Berlin, had won international acclaim for its jagged, geometrical shape. He had also won the competition for the expansion of London’s stately Victoria and Albert Museum. His star was on the rise and his work was iconic and singular.
“We’ve been living in Toronto for too long,” William Thorsell said. By this he meant the pale Protestant town of the nineteenth century that had survived into the 1960s, a conservative place that once looked enviously south toward Buffalo. The late historian Eric Arthur, who, in 1964, glimpsed a romance in the cityscape that eluded all but the most ardent lover, chronicled Toronto’s expansion, a Roman grid moving westward over ancient trails that ran to the lake. But Arthur’s love was largely unrequited. “Surely no city in the world with a background of three hundred years does so little to make that background known,” he wrote plaintively. Barring a few outbreaks of activism, the public has displayed a heroic indifference. Churches and university buildings survived, as is their habit. But thirty years of waterfront development schemes have died off-stage, leaving an ad hoc string of condominiums that may, in a decade, achieve the louche crumminess of the Costa del Sol. Toronto is defined by the vast sustaining error of the Gardiner Expressway, which divides the downtown from the waterfront, and by symbols such as the CN Tower, itself a mistake of sorts; it was designed as the centrepiece for a project that was never built. Unfulfilled ambition is the most palpable urban trope, but there is always the familiar damning prayer: It is livable.
Libeskind’s crystalline shapes exploding between the two original wings of the ROM represent the most dramatic architectural forms seen in Toronto since Viljo Revell’s City Hall, which was completed in 1965, and his design has invited the same exuberance and wariness. (Frank Lloyd Wright, who died before City Hall was built, criticized that design as “a headmarker for a grave. . . . Future generations will look at it and say: ‘This marks the spot where Toronto fell.’ “)
The ROM project coincided with a flurry of ambitious design in the city. Frank Gehry was hired to redesign the Art Gallery of Ontario, located just blocks from where he grew up. British architect Norman Foster was doing the Leslie L. Dan Pharmacy Building on a prominent University of Toronto site. William Alsop, the Sid Vicious of modern architecture, designed a building for the Ontario College of Art and Design, an opaque box hovering 26 metres above ground on brightly coloured stilts. And an opera house designed by local architect Jack Diamond was finally underway, a project that has a history too long and bloody for even Wagner to stage. This renaissance grabbed the attention of a city that was still, for the most part, imagined by colonial bureaucrats trying to recreate the Georgian comfort of home. The city became, in its modest way, a crucible for modern architecture. At the very least, these new forms revive an ancient argument: what is a building’s responsibility? Should it look to the past and to its immediate context, or can it exist as a singular monument? Libeskind’s ROM design, which has drawn both worshipful praise and outright hostility, emerged as the focus of this argument.
What William Thorsell was seeking with the ROM redesign was the still-audible echoes of the Bilbao effect: the ability of architecture to transform an institution, an economy, a city. Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, famously transformed a minor industrial city into a tourist destination. Bilbao itself started out as the Sydney effect; Gehry was initially told by the Basque government that it wanted another Sydney Opera House. From that point there has been a downward spiral that has captured the imagination of cities worldwide. The extent to which it has infected civic sensibilities was seen when the director of Rome’s National Center for the Contemporary Arts told the architect Rem Koolhaas that the city needed “a building that does for Rome what the Guggenheim did for Bilbao.” This is one legacy of the Bilbao effect: to reduce the grandest of cities to River City, Iowa, hoping that the next travelling salesman will deliver salvation. Bilbao came with an oft-quoted array of statistics (generating $500 million in economic activity in its first three years and $100 million in new taxes). When Vincor CEO Donald Triggs persuaded Gehry to design a winery in the Niagara peninsula, it was a marketing decision as much as an aesthetic one. The building would draw attention to the wine, and bring people to the winery. The cost, Triggs said, was his marketing budget for eternity.
But subsequent attempts to reproduce the magic of Bilbao haven’t always succeeded. Gehry’s Experience Music Project building in Seattle opened to great fanfare; eighteen months later, admissions were down by more than a third and 124 employees were laid off. Seattle represents the dark side of the Bilbao effect: the sense that smaller, more provincial cities are getting substandard knockoffs from great architects. Gehry’s defiantly unlovely EMP building is referred to locally as “the hemorrhoids.” Robert Venturi’s Seattle Art Museum has been criticized as being both dull and confusing, and Rem Koolhaas’s new public library is described as a “horror.” “It’s very provincial to want the newest and the bestest,” a Toronto architect said, and Seattle is paying for that provincialism, becoming a kind of anti-Bilbao.
In May, Gehry himself was quoted in The New York Times as saying the Bilbao effect was “dead in the water.” The era was over. Five months later, though, the concept was revived by Gehry’s own Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, which was touted as the remedy for L.A.’s historically formless downtown. Toronto was anxious for Bilbao, a little bit needy and a little bit late, both qualities of a mark. But the appetite for greatness, for recognition, was there.
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