Everyone seems pleased by Gehry's final redesign of the Art Gallery of Ontario, including himself. Christopher Hume takes us on a tour of the plan with Frank before construction is expected to begin next month. Read. | Related: AGO raises renovation budget - again
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Agog at the new AGO
For Gehry, it's been a tough redesign. But this time, it may just be perfect

CHRISTOPHER HUME

LOS ANGELES—Frank Gehry admits there were times when he regretted having anything to do with the Art Gallery of Ontario.

"I'm excited about it now," says the acclaimed Toronto-born architect. "But I spent a lot of time worrying about it. The thing we wanted was a definite budget, but we kept on going back and forth and getting double messages. We went through enough iterations that we finally came up with something reasonable. It got better."

The version that will finally be constructed starting next month really stands head and shoulders above anything shown so far. It makes sense in so many ways, big and small, that once they see it, Torontonians will get excited.

Wandering around Gehry's sprawling studio, past enormous models of the AGO that include tiny representations of every painting and sculpture, the visitor can't help but be struck by just how right the new gallery feels. Inside and out, Gehry has managed to bring clarity and coherence to a building that grew bit by bit and which never quite added up to more than the sum of its disparate parts.

As AGO chief curator Dennis Reid puts it, "Frank has rationalized the place."

The key, Gehry explains, was to re-establish Walker Court as the heart of the gallery. It is the organizing principle, the centre around which everything else radiates. In its current configuration, the AGO's main entrance is east of Walker Court. One enters from Dundas St. and immediately turns left or right depending on the final destination. Even for those familiar with the maze-like interior, there's little sense of connection between galleries.

"The big move," Gehry says, "was to re-orient the entrance with Walker Court. When you have a magnificent classical space like Walker Court you want to take advantage of it. But it had been trivialized."

In its next incarnation, the entrance will be directly south of Walker Court. Indeed, we will be able to see through the new building from Dundas all the way to the Grange at the south end. A skylight will replace the ceiling of the court and a dramatic spiral staircase will join it to the new contemporary galleries above. Moving the entrance west also frees up space for the AGO restaurant and store, both of which will be accessible from the street.

Speaking of the street, the new AGO will finally have a relationship with its surroundings. Though it has been a decade since the "moat" in front of the gallery was filled in, this is an institution that has never felt entirely comfortable with its role as an urban element. Above all, Gehry has used the occasion to reimagine the AGO as a thoroughly citified building. Indeed, the gallery will present itself to the city as a cultural spectacle on display to passersby.

This will be accomplished most obviously through the second-storey sculpture gallery that will extend from east to west, pretty much from end to end. This magnificent glass-enclosed space will reach out to within a metre of the edge of the sidewalk, bringing gallery and city closer than ever. In fact, the two will be so close now that the streetcar cables will be attached to the front façade of the AGO. This is a small point, it's true, but there's something quite appealing about the idea that the gallery would take the place of a utility pole.

The new façade, a transparent skin that will curve back from the front, will be supported on a series of wooden beams, a material Gehry seems to have rediscovered in recent years. A pair of "wings," one at each end, will serve as "billboards" on which events and exhibitions can be advertised.

"It's going to be very exciting," Gehry enthuses. "It's all wood and very Canadian."

By contrast, the rear façade, which faces Grange Park, will be clad in stainless steel. The main gesture here is an exterior spiral staircase that will connect the top two floors and provide a unique vantage point from which to view the city. Another set of spiral staircases will frame the Grange and increase permeability.

The spiral motif will also be seen in the new lobby, where it takes the form of a ramp (for disabled patrons) that will snake through the space and, at the same time, create openings that allow light to penetrate into the basement. Gehry used a similar technique to great effect at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena. In their own way, these spirals sum up what makes Gehry such a popular, if not populist, architect, namely his ability to transform strictly utilitarian features into something entertaining and multi-purpose.

For the most part, however, Gehry's task was to design galleries in which the Ken Thomson collection can be displayed along with the art and artifacts already owned by the AGO.

This is the kind of work that sends shivers down architects' spines, mainly because contemporary attitudes towards the visual arts verge on being fetishist. The modernist ideal of the perfect white box in which nothing is allowed to distract from the artwork has grown tiresome, predictable and even distracting.

Given the extent now of the AGO's holdings, the new galleries will have to address a variety of conditions. Major pieces such as Rubens' Massacre Of The Innocents, which will be part of the Thomson gift, will be displayed in a room of its own. Other, smaller, works such as Ken Thomson's miniatures and (Canadian painter) Tom Thomson's oil panels will be exhibited in clusters.

For Gehry, who works in three-dimensional models, designing involves a painstaking process of trial and error, of fiddling with details and working out the finer points of what goes where.

"One of the big challenges," Gehry says, "was to integrate Ken Thomson's collection without undermining the rest of the collection. It's about how you light the galleries, the scale of the rooms and how you install them. Many of these spaces will be used in ways we can't predict. It's hard to do galleries, hard to get them right. And there's so much heavy breathing about minimalist spaces."

Minimalism, of course, has no place in Gehry's work. He stands at the opposite end of the aesthetic spectrum, where architecture becomes a more expressive and sculptural art. Yet in the evolution of Gehry, the AGO represents him at his most restrained.

The curvilinear metallic volumes characteristic of his work from the mid-1980s until now are nowhere in evidence in Toronto. Instead, Gehry seems to have moved on to greater simplicity and angularity. True, the Dundas façade is one long curve, but it wants to disappear, exposing a series of wooden trusses and the gallery's more planar elements.

"Art has got to have a context," Gehry insists. "Buildings have got to have a personality. I wasn't totally happy with it before, but now I think it's going to be a blockbuster."

Let's hope he's right; the AGO has more riding on this project than any other it has undertaken in its 104-year history. Partly that's because, despite the constraints of cash and conservatism, this one came with enormous expectations. Not only is Gehry the most celebrated architect of the age, Ken Thomson's collection ranks among the most important in Canada.

More than that, Gehry was born here. He still has a deep emotional attachment to Toronto. He grew up close to the AGO and recalls it from his childhood. For him, this project was always more than an addition; it was a homecoming. Ironically, by his own admission, he couldn't have achieved what he has without leaving the city.

"I don't think I could've done it if I'd have stayed in Toronto," Gehry declares bluntly. "Canada's more conservative than the U.S."

On the other hand, we're so much more liberal than America. "It's scary," Gehry says of the Bush regime. "I've never experienced anything like it."

However, for the former Canadian, who turned 76 last week, the future doesn't depend on any single country. No matter where the job, he's never more than plane-ride away. Gehry has never been bigger, but the world has never been smaller.