Studio Libeskind viewed the repurposing of a mid-modern theater into the Sony Centre for the Performing Arts as an opportunity to integrate city life with culture and the arts in Toronto, Canada.  Working as part of a public/private partnership, the firm situated a 58-floor condominium tower next to the performing arts center and created a public plaza along the west side of the redevelopment. The L Tower extrudes upward, with bold, clean lines, until it expands with a dramatic backward curve at the top of the tower that prevents its shadow from being cast onto the adjacent Berczy Park. Inset…

The National Holocaust Monument, established through the National Holocaust Monument Act by the Government of Canada, will ensure a permanent, national symbol that will honor and commemorate the victims of the Holocaust and recognize Canadian survivors. The Monument stands on a .79 acre site at the intersection of Wellington and Booth Streets within the historic LeBreton Flats in Ottawa, symbolically located across from the Canadian War Museum. The Monument honors the millions of innocent men, women and children who were murdered under the Nazi regime and recognize those survivors who were able to eventually make Canada their home. The Monument…

The extension to the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), now named the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal, is situated at one of the most prominent intersections in downtown Toronto. It is the largest Museum in Canada and attracts more than a million visitors a year. Its new name is derived from the building’s five intersecting metal-clad volumes, which are reminiscent of crystals—inspired by the crystalline forms in the ROM’s mineralogy galleries. Libeskind created a structure of organically interlocking prismatic forms turning this important corner of Toronto, and the entire museum complex, into a luminous beacon. The design succeeds at inviting glimpses up, down,…

The Wheel of Conscience is a kinetic installation on display in Halifax at the Canadian Museum of Immigration on Pier 21, the gateway to Canada for a million immigrants and now a National Historic Site.  The work was inspired by the story of the M.S. St. Louis, a ship carrying Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, which the Canadian government turned away in 1939. The work is a heavy steel wheel placed vertically and housing four interlocking steel gears powered by an electric motor.  The words “hatred, racism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism” are applied in relief to the face of the gears. The…