Moronic, not "Pharaohonic"

Toronto Star architecture critic Christopher Hume is rapturous about the "human rights" mausoleum. To me it looks like a tin-foil beanie or, in a pinch, one of those spiky German helmets, but to Hume and the edifice's architect  it's...well, let's let them speak for themselves (and thus be hoist on their own sharp, spiky petards, more or less):

WINNIPEG–In its own way, every building tells a story. But few are told with as much drama as the Canadian Museum for Human Rights.


Under construction in the Manitoban capital near the forks of the Assiniboine and Red rivers, this extraordinary structure serves many purposes. As much as it is a museum, it's also a monument, a memorial, an icon – and a giant sculpture, albeit one that meets the Manitoba Building Code.

For its designer, award-winning American architect Antoine Predock, it is "the commission of a lifetime."

He points out that the building is "highly rational and pragmatic" as well as having "sculptural" qualities.


"A lot of form-making is empty; this is not shape-making for the sake of shape-making," he says.

From the outside, the museum will appear as an arrangement of very few elements, but each large and striking. At the centre is the Tower of Hope, a 30-storey spire that acts as the armature on which the bulk of the complex rests. It supports a huge glass shape, The Cloud, which contains many of the galleries and public spaces. Beneath that is a series of ramps, Pharaohonic in scale, that lead into the museum.

"I always speak of it as roots clutching at the earth," Predock explains. "So often, oppressed people are earth-connected. The Earth is our anchoring possibility. From there, you go up into the sky."...

Oh, brother. If Earth is our anchoring possiblity, then one over-ambitious architect seems to have come unmoored from his anchor. As for me, I always speak of the mausoleum as money clutching, since, so often and from now on, oppressed tax-payers will be on the hook for paying for this grandiose but essentially vapid and empty structure--the tomb of the well-know victim.