For years, I’ve been trying to hate the new addition to Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum, which opens this weekend. I think I’ve failed. (As I have with people in my life, whom I tried long and hard to dislike.)

I loathed how it began. It had the pinched, middle-class quality of trying too hard to impress the neighbours and thus, oneself. So you had to get the architectural flavour of the hour; find out who was hot enough to be asked to design a World Trade Centre memorial. It wasn’t even clear why a new entrance to the museum was needed. The old one was a great rotunda where generations of parents and kids wrenched their necks as they passed through. And how half-assed, just a façade rather than a new building.

Then it turned out the guy had already used this model in other cities, like Music Man Harold Hill whizzing through Iowa and conning all the locals with the same pitch. Did he tell some kids in his office to dust off the Denver template for Canadians? (Although, I grant, art is repetitive and obsessive, like most human behaviour: We keep going back to try and “get it right,” whatever it is.) The addition was supposed to be transparent, an actual “crystal.” But it turned out all that light would degrade the exhibits: Hey, surprise, it’s a museum! So now it’s not transparent, although there are some windowy bits.

When it was halfway up — a menacing, disjointed array of massive girders — I thought: Well, maybe if they’d leave it like that … — but of course they didn’t. ROM boss William Thorsell keeps saying it’s part of “the inevitable transition from the International Style,” leaving poor old Form Follows Function in the dust.

Well, I believe in the zeitgeist, but I believe in it least in the history of art, where self-promoting critics have used it to build careers while shilling for their pet theories and artworks. I rode my bike by the site last year, when it was way late and over budget, and saw Mr. Thorsell gazing at it fretfully, it seemed, from the other side of the street, as if thinking: What mess have I got into?

But I went by this week on a brisk walk. The hoardings are down. It looks vast, craggy, intimidating, like a sudden geologic formation you come on. Ancient in that sense, as museums are supposed to be: You know, dinosaurs and rock collections; but also fabricated, sort of the way the apes come upon the monolith in 2001. It fits for a museum.

But what of the old classical ROM, now strangely attached? It looks odd. And yet the old ROM is old, it’s become a bit of a museum exhibit itself, which the new part sort of erupts from, like rocky outcroppings, making museum sense. (Or you can call the addition a carbuncle on the old part, as one disgruntled observer said.)

Would it have been better not to build it, and spend the money on housing the homeless or a safer environment for at-risk youth? Absolutely, if that had been a choice. But it never is. Had it not been built, the money, public and private, would have gone into tax cuts and offshore condos. And if there was a political impulse here to deal seriously with those social crises, then it would probably also find enough money to spend on structures that enhance the common public experience, like a new, better ROM.

It takes time to form collective civic judgments on these big public projects. In the case of the ROM, the real arbiters are kids. Everybody came as a kid and remembers the totem poles, dinosaurs, mummies, the suits of armour; and then everybody brings their kids, or somebody’s kids. It’s a rare cultural institution genuinely rooted here and anyone who tampers with that, for example by spending all the bucks on the façade and letting the collections and programs languish, should be run out of town.

But I sat in the Pizza Hut across from it last week with an eight-year-old who goes often and has seen the new part rise most of his life. He looked and looked and seemed pleased; it suited him fine.

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.