From the Post:
ROM addition is 'fascinating mess' still in progress
Michael Lee-Chin Crystal
By Alison Broverman
Shahe Sagharian can't go anywhere without people begging to visit him at work.
He's the project manager and team leader at Halsall, the engineering consulting firm working with the Royal Ontario Museum on Toronto's most-talked-about architectural addition - Daniel Libeskind's highly anticipated Michael Lee-Chin Crystal, which is slated to open by the end of this year.
"All winter long, everyone I know has been asking, 'When can we go in the crystal?' " he says. "So we thought we'd have a little open house for our engineering and architecture colleagues."
This is how some 200 wide-eyed architects and engineers (and a couple of lucky members of the press), bedecked in white hard hats and steel-toed galoshes, came to be swarming the ROM's "fascinating mess" on Friday afternoon, all jumping at the opportunity for an up-close-and-personal tour of the impressive tangle of stell that has been growing on Bloor Street over the past few years.
"There are about 30 of us here from my firm," says one young architect, who has been excitedly snapping photos of everything from the detailed joints of the steel frame to the graffitti left by a Habs-loving construction worker.
The Crystal actually comprises of five steel-framed "crystals", all fitted together to support one another like a complex, three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle.
"It's gravity-defying, or at least architects like to say it is," says Halsall's Chris Welch. "The steel in this structure weights twice as much as that in a typical high-rise office tower."
The final piece of steel completed the frame last July, and workers are now tolling to finish the structure's cladding, or "building envelope," as Welch explains the term. "Some people just say walls and windows."
Even without its cladding, the Crystal is already breathtaking. In spite of the chaos of the construction site, the structure that will eventually house the museum's entrance hall feels majestic and serene, almost hushed. The eye is drawn upward to two small geometric jutting of steel that will become skylights.
Slowly but surely, the fascinating mess is getting tidier.
AoD