Fresh on the heels of Selldorf Architects’ most recent museum upgrade, the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) announced its selection of a team led by Annabelle Selldorf's firm to oversee its new AGO Global Contemporary expansion beginning in 2024. 

Two Row Architects will join Diamond Schmitt on the project that will give the institution an extended footprint for the first time since its last Frank Gehry-designed expansion opened in the fall of 2008.

The museum has undergone a total of seven renovations since first opening in 1900, and is now looking to add about 50,000 square feet of new galleries that reportedly comes in the form of “flexible volumes suited to the varied media of contemporary art.”

The AGO’s director Stephan Jost also said “we want the work we show to reflect the city that we serve,” and that the expansion should be responsive to the institution’s new targets for audience development and community involvement. Plans are for a six-story tower to be constructed along the southeast corner of the building fronting Grange Park with sensitivities to the Gehry structure and planned expansion of the OCAD University’s neighboring facilities by Morphosis.

“The Gehry and the Alsop are big statements and very Expressionist,” Jost told The Globe and Mail. “So I knew that competing visually was not the right way to go. This addition had to be super subtle.”

Part of the expansion will focus on improving wayfinding for visitors and reportedly aims to remake the AGO into one of the world’s only net-zero-certified cultural institutions of any size. Annabelle Selldorf said she felt the expansion has parallels to the recent Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego project and that the firm will draw on similar expansion efforts at the Frick Collection and Neue Galerie to inform their design.

“It is a very complex job, and we have to get our feet wet and understand the visitor’s experience,” she told The Globe and Mail. “The architectural form will follow. I think great architecture leaves a quiet imprint on the visitor’s memory. Not the first thing — hopefully they remember the art that they look at first — but the two go hand in hand.”

The next step would be the public review process that culminates in a concept presentation for review by the AGO’s Board of Trustees later in the year. Construction is expected to begin shortly after pending the Board’s approval.

“It’s going to be a damn good piece of architecture,” Jost said confidently. “It’s not going to be the loudest building on the skyline, but it’s going to be one of the best.”