Always, before the unveiling of a project design, Frank Gehry feels a foreboding of public scorn. He agonized before the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao opened in 1997, and remembers how some berated his Disney Concert Hall, recently opened to critical acclaim, as broken crockery. Now, days before he is finally able to show his design for the redevelopment of the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, his artistic angst is creeping up on him. "It's hard to work in Canada. I heard today that people are saying, 'Why did anybody need a Frank Gehry building?' ..... I don't want to be where I'm not wanted."
His homecoming in Toronto has included some pomp and ceremony — and heartfelt cheering from the crowds — but it hasn't been a carefree ride. Unlike any of Gehry's other projects, the Art Gallery of Ontario is a two-headed client: There's AGO director Matthew Teitelbaum and then there's the publishing magnate Kenneth Thomson, who has donated not only his massive collection of art but also $70-million in cash to a reinvented art gallery.
Added to the froth is a residual expectation that maybe, if everybody tries a little harder, $200-million — the estimated budget for the project — will buy the architectural ecstasy of Bilbao.
And then there's the wash of emotions that Gehry feels now that he is officially designing a major piece for his hometown in a neighbourhood where he grew up. "It's loaded," says Gehry. "It's very loaded."
More than 70 schemes have been produced for the AGO. On Wednesday, the public will be invited to see a final model for the gallery, which has been locked behind doors and guarded by security. The design has been maintained as top secret. All consultants, even Gehry, have been sworn to strict confidentiality.
What seems clear, however, is that the design will essentially replace much of the gallery's Dundas Street front façade with a series of vertical elevations rising not much higher than the three-storey Victorian houses and businesses located across the street. The building will open itself generously to the street, with the Henry Moore collection released from its current cloistered gallery.
A new entrance directly on axis with the gallery's historic Walker Court will offer direct views from the street into the gallery.
A new feature stairway rises up through the court to bring visitors to either Thomson's collection or to the art gallery's holdings, with the possibility of experiencing one or the other along the way. The circulation will be logical and controlled, without the kind of dazzling, space-consuming bridges that are part of the Bilbao signature.
Important new square footage is found along the south, or back, section of the gallery. Here, the skylight of the sculpture court, an important part of the Barton Myers/Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blumberg addition (1993), is popped off, and glassy galleries are added on top. New structural foundations will be dug to support the galleries, which rise up to allow views over the mature trees of Grange Park and east to the new hovering tabletop by British architect Will Alsop at the Ontario College of Art and Design.
In an hour-long interview from his office in Los Angeles, Gehry is thoughtful, honest and funny. He's also exhausted. He returned from Europe the night before, and the jet lag — he turns 75 next month — is hard on him. When he speaks about his project for the AGO, it is with a kind of clinical detachment. He doesn't express love for the project. He doesn't sound passionate about it. He sounds convinced by his solution: It works. It works for his two-headed client. It works for the neighbourhood. It works for the city. And, yes, ultimately it works for him.
In other words, a solution has been found, just as a mathematician solves a difficult problem.
In 2002, when Gehry was first appointed as architect of the massive redevelopment, the first brief he received from the gallery was to design an eight-storey tower at the corner of McCaul Street, along the AGO's eastern flank. But, says Gehry, "I thought that wasn't very good." Over the past months, consulting on the design and visiting the site, he managed to shift the brief dramatically. At the same time, he found a solution that satisfied many people: "I had Ken and Matthew and Ken's people and Matthew's people and my people," he says, with a droll sense of humour.
Gehry's degree from Harvard University is in city planning and urban design, so he's preoccupied about creating not only the right building, but creating the right building on the right site. When he was first toured through Bilbao by the Basque government and the Guggenheim's Thomas Krens, he had a look at the wine-storage warehouse in the city's core that was being proposed for a cultural museum — and rejected it as unworkable. Instead, he studied the city and pinpointed with Krens an industrial site on the Nervion River for the way it created an important cultural triangle with the Bellas Artes Museum and the university. In the end, what Gehry produced for the Guggenheim are roiling forms that kneel down along the Nevrion and snake their way under a six-lane bridge — the freeway gets a hip check with his splayed tower.
There were tensions at the AGO between its curators and Thomson's desires for his collection. There were also misconceptions from some members of the gallery board about what the Canadian dollar could buy. "At first it looked impossible to get what Ken wanted to fit with what the AGO wanted to fit urbanistically," says Gehry. "It looked damn impossible." At one point, Gehry said the gallery should consider another site.
Clouding the issue of what is logically best for the AGO has been the phenomenon of city-defining buildings being produced around the world by superstars like Gehry. "With Libeskind doing his thing [the redevelopment of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto] and my notoriety, the idea becomes that we've got to do something that knocks their socks off and that's not a rational thing to do for a remodelling of a building," says Gehry. "When you're remodelling, you're held to a different order of magnitude."
The Art Gallery of Ontario, says Teitelbaum, never needed to be fixed. "If I point out things that frustrate me about the building — like when you walk into the building, you hit a dead end — they're minor," he says. "I don't wake up in the middle of the night and say, 'God, I've got to fix this.'." But when Thomson agreed that, yes, he would be willing to part with his much-loved collection, an opportunity presented itself. And the opportunity turned golden when Thomson agreed to donate $70-million in cash to the gallery's remodelling.
Even if it doesn't turn out to be one of Gehry's truly audacious designs, the redevelopment of the AGO promises to unfold like a journey, says Teitelbaum: "It's through volumes of different size, light of different richness, materials of similarity and contrast. It's a journey through quite a varied range of experiences."
There will surely be changes to come as the project moves into design development under the watchful eye of Gehry and project manager Craig Webb. Central to the building's transformation has been a desire to honour the collections, and respect the scale of the dense, urban neighbourhood in which the museum is sited.
The success of a city rises and falls according to the ambitions and desires of its people. Time morphs the shape of cities — its buildings — into unrecognizable, unpredictable forms. Over the last century, the AGO has accommodated all construction systems of the modern era, everything from wood trusses, precast concrete, post-tension concrete and structural steel.
Architects are hired, asked to respond to a program, and respond as best as they can. Barton Myers introduced his version of the gallery over a previous addition completed in 1977 by John C. Parkin. Now, only about a decade later, Gehry has been invited to town to work his magic. It's not easy to erase the work of another. At a recent cocktail party, says Gehry, Myers wouldn't talk to him.
There's a tremendous amount of risk and risk-taking behind the making of every great city. As the AGO's director, Teitelbaum has taken an important risk. As its chief donor, Thomson has been implicated in the story of risk. As its architect coming home to design for the first time, Gehry's stakes are perhaps particularly high. On Wednesday, his design will be out there — and everybody will see whether the risk was worth taking.
