Museum Trip

For my birthday Andrew bought me a membership to the ROM. So yesterday we went for the fist time inside the new wing. A while ago we went and looked at the outside and had mixed feelings. We both like modern architecture and we both want to like this addition but we just don't. There is a mixture of practical problems that seem amateurish in a building of this magnitude. The dinosaurs are now housed on the second floor of the crystal which makes some of them visible from the street. This is visually stunning and attractive. Inside the new Dinosaur exhibit the walls are all stark white with the the bones displayed like sculptures. Very different from the scene from Jurassic Park that was the old style of display. I think there are more actual dinosaurs on display but there also seems to be a lot of dead space and there is no clear traffic pattern. You can find yourself at a dead end and have to back track but are still unsure if you have seen everything. We may feel differently when we go when the room is not teeming with people. The walls are starting to get grubby from fingers and shoes scuffs already. I think somebody forgot that old museums were made of stone and marble not because they were expensive and impressive but because they were easy to clean and didn't show every mark.

We spent the afternoon going from old to new museum and thinking about why we were having such a hard time with the new addition. Andrew says that the new crystal has "bad chi" (its a feng shui thing). I just felt like if underutilized the space and seemed cheap in comparison to the old building with its majestic stairs, mosaic ceilings and stone floors. There are still a lot of renovations happening in the old part of the museum and hopefully in time there will be a better balance to the displays. We will of course go back regularly when the place is a little quieter and spend more time in some places we missed this time.