The high, white interior walls that form the new entrance at Bloor Street create a cold, unfriendly reception. A fast walk across the large expanse of floor to the museum's original lobby brings quick relief for the bewildered senses. Here intimacy and warmth rule as opposed to the impersonal, visually shifting Libeskind creation. Neither visually nor emotionally can the eye deal well with walls that are at sloping, shifting angles, nor with the height that offers no inspiring focal point at the top.

While the new, larger gift shop at the Bloor Street entrance is full of delightful and expensive gifts to take home as a reminder of this multi-purpose museum, it cannot compensate for the impersonal entrance. Perhaps the most uncomfortable, unflattering mental image that forms in the mind as the eye is drawn upward is a sense of the new interior being 'cheap'. These high, white walls look unfinished. They look like huge plaster board panels although they are not. Architecturally, the spaces between the huge panels—whatever they are made of—are actually there to allow for the shifting of the weight of the new building on the old one.

There is no denying that the way the two buildings have been joined is a marvelous engineering solution. Sadly, most visitors will be unaware of this marvel and so what they see in this new lobby will fail to inspire awe, something that is expected from such a structure.

A walk through several galleries in the new section also left the eye unsatisfied. Sloping, shifting walls, wasted floor spaces, make the various Lee-Chin Crystal galleries far from exalting. The curators of shows set in these spaces have to work rather too hard to make the best use of them. Where there are windows, they appear small, and seem to lead nowhere. Sometimes, to protect exhibits, they have to be covered up, defeating the very reason for existing. Whom to blame for this, the architect or the museum's selection committee? Who has failed to think out the spaces and permanent galleries before going ahead with the structure that wraps itself around the old museum? While it is always nice to have a building that is declared a work of art, it must also be remembered that a building has a ulitarian reason for existing. It is not just a piece of sculpture. It is a structure that serves an interior purpose.

There is no denying that this Crystal (actually there are five) is a dramatic sight from outside. It draws the eye to the ROM as people walk east or west on Bloor Street. The original building—actually there are two originals joined together in the 1930s—would never have attracted the kind of attention this new structure receives. So, from an exterior point of view, the Crystal is a success.

There is an oft repeated story about its creation. It is said it was inspired by crystals in the ROM's natural history collection. This seems a bit of a contrived tale. The story also circulates that it owes its existence to a design drawn on a napkin at a family wedding in Toronto (Libeskind is married to David Lewis's daughter Nina, and is brother-in-law to Stephen Lewis). If the new ROM is inspired by the crystals in the ROM collection why does it look like several other of Libeskind's designs?

The reason for a somewhat cynical view of the first of the two creation stories is that the architect also planned a wrap-around named The Spiral for London's Victoria and Albert Museum at the Exhibition Road side of the museum. It fell through in 2004 because of lack of public funding after about eight years of planning. Most conspicuous in similarity to the ROM Crystal is the Libeskind creation in Las Vegas where a shopping mall is known as The Crystals. It is part of the huge development known as the MGM City Center. This mall also consists of five crystals, although they are not wrapped around a building. But it is not very flattering to Toronto or the ROM to have this mall called Crystals, even if in 2007 the Condé Nast Traveler magazine named Libeskind's ROM creation one of the "new seven wonders of the world."

To look further, there are definitely familiar design elements cropping up at the Creative Media Centre, University of Hong Kong, now in progress, or the shopping center designed by the architect for Bern which features the same kind of sloping, slotted windows we see on the ROM Crystal. The extension of the Denver Art Museum, finished before the ROM structure, has familiar elements as does the design for the Contemporary Jewish Museum San Francisco. It is not just the signature of an architect one sees, but a borrowing from one building to the next.

Whatever the similarities or differences of Libeskind creations at the exterior level, what is of concern is the interior of the ROM structure. So far there appears no justification for the wasted spaces, the useless windows, the discomforting sloping of walls. There is a sense that there are an awful lot of curators who silently curse the board of directors for having allowed this structure to come into existence without thought of what is to go inside of it. There may be more space for displays, but it is awkward space.