Word: museume
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...Lake Ontario the skyline is bristling with condo towers. Nearly all the construction from these years has been fairly conventional, though - this is still a city where the developer's box rules. But in one part of town, the rules have changed. On June 2 the venerable Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) will officially open a new addition designed by the architect Daniel Libeskind in his most implacable and declarative style. And with that, the boomtown will be getting a building that goes boom all by itself...
...doesn't look much like the original building, which is actually two buildings: a yellow brick structure from 1912 that was overtaken in 1932 by a weighty limestone addition in a Beaux Arts style with trace elements of the Gothic and Baroque. Libeskind's Crystal bursts from the old museum's limestone in pointed shards of anodized aluminum. It touches the ground with the jagged footprint of a fever chart. Windows slice across the surface in narrow diagonal stripes or in large trapezoids that cut widely up and across the building's various façades and open views...
Sunny, oracular and indefatigable, Libeskind tends to smile, especially when he's at his most argumentative. He knows that people like their geniuses to be daringly off the cuff sometimes. So he sketched out his initial plan for the museum on a dozen or so napkins, which the ROM duly displayed behind frames when it mounted a show of proposals by the architects in the running for the commission. But ROM director William Thorsell says that Libeskind followed up his napkins with the most thorough analysis of the project offered by any of the contenders...
...building to bring life to Bloor Street, Toronto's main upscale shopping drag. "It was very important to us to see this as an urban project, not just an institutional one," says Thorsell, a former editor in chief of the Globe and Mail who wanted to bring the museum into the wider world he was accustomed to. "The old ROM had its elbows up high against the city; it was a big no. I wanted transparency and engagement on Bloor Street, a major urban interface...
...years after his death, Poiret's estate sold roughly 500 pieces to New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art. The result is "Poiret: King of Fashion," which runs at the Met's Costume Institute until Aug. 5. Fifty ensembles showcase Poiret's eclectic exoticism. Harem pants worn by his wife, Denise, at his legendary Arabian-themed Thousand and Second Night party in 1911 are displayed with the Hellenic evening gown worn by dancer Isadora Duncan to his Bacchus party in 1912. Denise, whose lithe body was perfect for his creations, was his muse. The couple divorced...