The Globe and Mail has a very interesting interview with architect Daniel Libeskind on designing a modern museum, although the new Lee-Chin Crystal wing at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. Although the author comes away with many questions unanswered.

My next question: What would you have done with an additional hundred million dollars, is similarly end-run. “Nothing. Not a thing.” In other words, there was no possible way to improve with a larger budget? How can this be? “Money is not a determinant of architecture. If you give a poet more money, the poem he writes wouldn’t be any better.”

I am torn between the need to write this down and the desire to explain that poets don’t build their poems from concrete and glass – which cost money – but I am aware of the grains of sand slipping though the hourglass, so I plunge ahead.

Is he disappointed that the final design for the Crystal couldn’t include more glass? “We have more glass here than any museum in the world,” he says, roundly denying that more glass was ever intended in the original design. “The model was an abstraction,” he says. Citing the conservation issues around daylight flooding the galleries, he went on: “Nobody wants a glass museum, believe me.” Except in the dinosaur galleries, I say? “Well,” he says, “dinosaurs roamed the Earth, not vitrines.”

via arts journal