The Globe and Mail

Daniel Libeskind's well-known cocktail-napkin doodle of what has become the Royal Ontario Museum's Crystal addition is both dangerous and instructive. It's dangerous because it suggests that the journey from napkin to finished work required no other hand than Mr. Libeskind's, while nothing could be further from the truth. Despite this, it's instructive because it shows that original pie-in-the-sky concepts are often scaled back before construction begins because of budget constraints or logistics. In the Toronto Archive's new exhibit, "A Work in Progress: Preserving Toronto's Architectural Record," curator Patrick Cummins has successfully addressed both issues. Using the vast wealth of material at his fingertips - conceptual sketches, renderings, correspondence between architect and client, blueprints filed with the city, landscape plans and post-construction photographs - Mr. Cummins demonstrates architecture's collaborative nature by telling the stories of individual buildings, from their concept to completion.