Royal Ontario Museum

About

The Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) is a museum of art, world culture and natural history in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is one of the largest museums in North America and the largest museum in Canada. It attracts more than one million visitors every year, making it the most-visited museum in Canada. The 74,000-square-metre (800,000-square-foot) museum building is located north of Queen's Park, in the University district, with its main entrance on Bloor Street West. Museum subway station is named after it and, since a 2008 renovation, is decorated to resemble the ROM's collection at the platform level; Museum station's northwestern entrance directly serves the museum. Established on April 16, 1912, and opened on March 19, 1914, the ROM has maintained close relations with the University of Toronto throughout its history, often sharing expertise and resources. It was under direct control and management of the University of Toronto until 1968, when it became an independent Crown agency of the Government of Ontario. It is Canada's largest field-research institution, with research and conservation activities worldwide. With more than 18 million items and 40 galleries, the museum's diverse collections...

The Royal Ontario Museum was formally established on April 16, 1912, and was jointly governed by the Government of Ontario and the University of Toronto. Its first assets were transferred from the university and the Ontario Department of Education, coming from its predecessor, the Museum of Natural History and Fine Arts at the Toronto Normal School. On 19 March 1914, the Duke of Connaught, also the governor general of Canada, officially opened the Royal Ontario Museum to the public. The museum's location at the edge of Toronto's built-up area, far from the city's central business district, was selected mainly for its proximity to the University of Toronto St. George. The original building was constructed on the western edge of the property along the university's Philosopher's Walk, with its main entrance facing out onto Bloor Street housing five separate museums of the following fields: Archaeology, Palaeontology, Mineralogy, Zoology, and Geology. It cost CA$400,000 to construct. This was the first phase of a two-part construction plan intended to expand toward Queen's Park Crescent, ultimately creating an H-shaped structure.

The first expansion to the Royal Ontario Museum publicly opened on October 12, 1933. The CA$1.8 -million renovation saw the construction of the east wing fronting onto Queen's Park and required the demolition of Argyle House, a Victorian mansion at 100 Queen's Park. As this occurred during the Great Depression, an effort was made to use primarily local building materials and to make use of workers capable of manually excavating the building's foundations. Teams of workers alternated weeks of service due to the physically draining nature of the job.

In 1947, the ROM was dissolved as a body corporate, with all assets transferred to the University of Toronto. The museum remained part of the University until 1968, when it, along with the newly opened McLaughlin Planetarium, was reincorporated as a single separate entity. The planetarium was named after benefactor Samuel McLaughlin, who provided CA$2 million for its construction.

The second major addition to the museum was the Queen Elizabeth II Terrace Galleries on the north side of the building and a curatorial centre built on the south, which started in 1978 and was completed in 1984. The new construction meant that a former outdoor "Chinese Garden" to the north of the building facing Bloor, along with an adjoining indoor restaurant, had to be dismantled. Opened in 1984 by Queen Elizabeth II, the CA$55 million expansion took the form of layered terraces, each rising layer stepping back from Bloor Street. The design of this expansion won a Governor-General's Award in Architecture.

In 1989, activists complained about its Into the Heart of Africa exhibit, which featured stereotypes of Africans, forcing curator Jeanne Cannizzo to resign.

In December 1995, ROM closed the McLaughlin Planetarium due to provincial government budget cuts. The space was later leased to the Children's Own Museum from 1998 to 2002, and was eventually sold to the University of Toronto for CA$22 million in 2009.

In early November of 2025, the City of Toronto issued a permit for the demolition of the entire Planetarium except its foundations. In 1995 the University of Toronto had revealed its plans for the building, which would become an addition to the St. George campus. In early spring of 2026 demolition began to happening, following through on this decades old plan. Once complete it will become part of U of T's School of Cities, which will include a brand new recital hall. The building will also have spaces for U of T's Faculty of Arts and Science, Law, and Music.

Beginning in 2002, the museum underwent a major renovation and expansion project dubbed as Renaissance ROM. The Ontario and Canadian governments, both supporters of this venture, contributed $60 million toward the project, and Michael Lee-Chin donated $30 million. The campaign aimed not only to raise annual visitor attendance from 750,000 to between 1.4 and 1.6 million, but also to generate additional funding opportunities to support the museum's research, conservation, galleries and educational public programs. The centrepiece of the project was a deconstructivist crystalline-form structure called the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal. The structure was created by architect Daniel Libeskind, whose design was selected from among 50 finalists in an international competition. The design of the Crystal required the Terrace Galleries to be torn down (the curatorial centre to the south remains). Existing galleries and buildings were also upgraded, along with the installation of multiple new exhibits over a period of months. The first phase of the Renaissance ROM project, the "Ten Renovated Galleries in the Historic Buildings", opened to the public on 26 December 2005. The architectural opening of the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal took place less than 18 months later, on 2 June 2007. The final cost of the project was about CA$270 million.

The museum undertook renovations in 2024, which continues into 2026, as well as correcting architectural deficiencies to the Crystal while respecting Libeskind's original architectural design. Renovations include an expanded skylight to provide more natural lighting to its atrium, as well as an additional staircase within the atrium and the reconstruction of the entrance plaza to be level to allow for street performances.

The museum complex is made up of several components, including the original building completed in 1914, the eastern wing added in 1933, the curatorial centre completed in 1984, and the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal unveiled in 2007. The original building was listed by the City of Toronto on the Municipal Heritage Register on 20 June 1973, designated under Part IV of the Ontario Heritage Act in 2003, with a Heritage Easement on the buildings.

Designed by Toronto architects Frank Darling and John A. Pearson, the architectural style of the original building (now the western wing) is a synthesis of Italianate and Neo-Romanesque. The structure is heavily massed and punctuated by rounded and segmented arched windows with heavy surrounds and hood mouldings. Other features include applied decorative eave brackets, quoins and cornices.

The eastern wing facing Queen's Park was designed by Alfred H. Chapman and James Oxley. Opened in 1933, it included the museum's elaborate art deco, Byzantine-inspired rotunda and a new main entrance. The linking wing and rear (west) façade of the Queen's Park wing were originally done in the same yellow brick as the 1914 building, with minor Italianate detailing. This façade broke away from the heavy Italianate style of the original structure. It was built in a neo-Byzantine style with rusticated stone, triple windows contained within recessed arches and different-coloured stones arranged in a variety of patterns. This development from the Roman-inspired Italianate to a Byzantine-influenced style reflected the historical development of Byzantine architecture from Roman architecture. Common among neo- Byzantine buildings in North America, the façade also contains elements of Gothic Revival in its relief carvings, gargoyles and statues. The ornate ceiling of the rotunda is covered predominantly in gold back painted glass mosaic tiles, with coloured mosaic geometric patterns and images of real and mythical animals with symbols of the civilizations of the world from the early ages of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas through to the European Middle Ages, the latter seen as the culmination of art when the Byzantine style prevailed.

Writing in the Journal of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada in 1933, A. S. Mathers said of the expansion:

The interior of the building is a surprise and a pleasant one; the somewhat complicated ornament of the façade is forgotten and a plan on the grand manner unfolds itself. It is simple, direct and big in scale. One is convinced that the early Beaux-Arts training of the designer has not been in vain. The outstanding feature of the interior is the glass mosaic ceiling of the entrance rotunda. It is executed in colours and gold and strikes a fine note in the one part of the building which the architect could decorate without conflicting with the exhibits.

The original building and the 1933 expansion have been listed since 1973 as heritage buildings of Toronto. In 2005, a major renovation of the heritage wings saw the galleries made larger, windows uncovered, and the original early 20th-century architecture made more prominent. The exteriors of the heritage buildings were cleaned and restored. The restoration of the 1914 and 1933 buildings was the largest heritage project undertaken in Canada. The renovation also included the newly restored Rotunda with reproductions of the original oak doors, a restored axial view from the Rotunda west through to windows onto Philosophers' Walk and ten renovated galleries comprising a total of 8,000 square metres (90,000 sq ft).

In the master plan designed by Darling and Pearson in 1909, the ROM took a form similar to that of J. N. L. Durand's ideal model of the museum. It was envisioned as a square plan with corridors running through the centre of the composition, converging in the middle with a domed rotunda. Overall, it referenced the upper-class palaces of the 17th and 18th centuries and aimed at having a strong sense of monumentality. All the architectural elements—the deep cornice, decorative top, eave brackets—add to this strength that the ROM possessed, as it was purely a structure with the function of collecting, but not of exhibiting.

During the mid-2010s, the eastern entrance was used as a café. Since late 2017, the eastern entrance is undergoing renovation to become an alternate entrance, complete with the addition of ramps to the eastern entrance. The eastern entrance is a few steps from Museum station 's northern entrance.

Designed by Toronto architect Gene Kinoshita, with Mathers & Haldenby, the curatorial centre forms the southern section of the museum. Completed in 1984, it was built during the same expansion as the former Queen Elizabeth II Terrace Galleries, which stood on the north side of the museum before the terrace galleries were replaced with the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal. The architecture is a simple modernist style of poured concrete, glass, and pre-cast concrete and aggregate panels. The curatorial centre houses the museum's administrative and curatorial services and provides storage for artifacts that are not on exhibit. In 2006, the curatorial centre was renamed to "Louise Hawley Stone Curatorial Centre" in honour of the late Louise Hawley Stone, who donated a number of artifacts and various collections to the museum. In her will, she transferred C$49.7 million to the Louise Hawley Stone Charitable Trust, created to help with the upkeep of the building and to the acquisition of new artifacts.

Replacing the Queen Elizabeth II Terrace Galleries was the controversial "Michael Lee-Chin Crystal", a multimillion-dollar expansion to the museum designed by Daniel Libeskind, including a new sliding door entrance on Bloor Street, first opened in 2007. The Deconstructivist crystalline form is clad in 25 percent glass and 75 percent aluminum, sitting on top of a steel frame. The Crystal's canted walls do not touch the sides of the existing heritage buildings but are used to close the envelope between the new form and existing walls. These walls act as a pathway for pedestrians to travel safely across the Crystal.