I used to think the Robarts Library in Toronto was the worst building in the city -- ugly, insensitive to its context, and ill-designed for what it is used for.
Now I think the Crystal at the Royal Ontario Museum may have replaced it. It's not ugly; it's rather beautiful in a certain way. But surely one of the things the architectural heritage movement has taught in recent generations is that buildings ought to work with their surroundings. The Crystal spits at the ROM and the neighbourhood.
Val Ross, the Globe & Mail's writer on historical and museological stories (and what an asset to the paper she has become on that beat), has a piece today that is both coolly objective and absolutely devastating about the Crystal as a museum space.
