When the Royal Ontario Museum’s new addition — the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal — opens next month, it will be a year-and-a-half behind the fast-track schedule and $50 million over budget. Chalk up the delays and overruns to a dearth of structural steel on the market and a complicated design by architect Daniel Libeskind. The Crystal has virtually no 90 degree angles, says Francisco Alvarez, ROM’s director of communications. The engineering team was faced with a daunting task of how to turn Libeskind’s design into a metal building that would stand up. “It was often a matter of doing two or three passes at a method of construction to get it right,” adds Alvarez. Delays also resulted because of the shortage of custom steel in Canada. From the time the project was priced out to when it went to tender three years later, steel building prices had nearly doubled because of the pent-up demand in China. Other Toronto projects also have budget overruns because of the steel shortage, says Alvarez, such as the Art Gallery of Ontario’s new addition and the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts as examples. Martin says the Crystal differs from conventional building methods where a portion of the steel buildings' skeletons are erected first, followed by poured concrete slabs. Not so at ROM. Following conventional construction methods would have left the structure unstable. “We had to put up all the structural steel and shore it up before we could pour any concrete and put up any cladding.” Another complication was that every steel element had to fit “pretty well perfectly,” Martin says. “If it didn’t, we couldn’t just move it to the side and cut it to fit. Everything is fabricated with connections in six or seven different directions coming into a connection point.” Installing the steel building frame was also a tall order - particularly in regards to the extruded aluminum cladding panels The lack of right angles at panel intersections made for an interesting problem. Like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, no panel could be recut on site or the Crystal simply wouldn’t have fit together. Each panel was precision cut in Germany by fabricator Josef Gardner, the company also responsible for the cladding’s erection. On the inside of the Crystal, the task of installing walls and ceilings meant that workers could install them was with ladders and, in some cases, wearing workboots with cleats to climb the walls. There was no room for scissor lifts or even scaffolding in some areas, says Martin, who calls the Crystal is the most unusual building he’s ever constructed. “It’s been a great job to work on.”