The dazzling transformation of the Art Gallery of Ontario is both a personal and professional achievement for world-renowned architect Frank Gehry, left.
“It’s a great pleasure to come home to a place I knew as a child,” said Gehry, who was born in Toronto in 1929 and is now based in Los Angeles. He was in town for the recent reopening of the gallery.
It was more than 70 years ago that Gehry first visited the gallery and experienced the art there.
The AGO’s new Thomson collection includes 130 historical ship models, from the Napoleonic era to the 20th century, which are displayed in Gehry’s newly designed wave-shaped cases. The ship models are part of the 2,000 Canadian and European paintings and objects donated to the AGO by the late billionaire Ken Thomson.
“My fantasy is that kids will come to this museum, see the ships and get involved in something else – that’s what happened to me when I was eight years old,” Gehry said, speaking in the gallery’s historic Walker Court, which he redesigned with a glass roof.
Gehry, who began the $276-million transformation project more than six years ago, spent two years designing galleries to house the Thomson collection of 700 Canadian works, including paintings by Tom Thomson and Lawren Harris, and 900 European works. All 2,000 pieces of the collection were hung or arranged by David, Thomson’s son.
At liberty to redesign almost any space in the AGO, Gehry decided not to change the European Gallery, because as a child he remembered it to be perfect and childhood memories are important to him.
“The one thing that bothered me when I came to the AGO before we did this, is you’d walk in the door and you were confused where you were going,” he said.
“As a kid, I remember Walker Court and coming right in – there wasn’t the DNA in this building to have an entry to this courtyard, so I thought it was important to re-establish that with the new building.”
Once you enter the building, a curved, serpentine-shaped ramp draws you to Walker Court, at the heart of the AGO. “Hopefully, that’ll lead to clarity when you come in – you’ll know where you are and where to go,” Gehry said.
Visitors can experience the Vivian and David Campbell Centre for Contemporary Art by taking the Allan Slaight and Emmanuelle Gattuso soaring staircase off Walker Court. The contemporary gallery’s 200 works, arranged chronologically from the 1960s to the present, include art by Toronto’s Kent Monkman, Robert Rauschenberg and Montreal artist Betty Goodwin, whose work expresses mourning and loss.
To connect the galleries, Gehry designed a spiral stairway at the south side of the building. The stairway has a glassed-in tower that allows visitors to reconnect with the city and then go back into the galleries, said Craig Webb, an architect who worked with Gehry on the redesign.
“Seeing daylight gives you a different sense of what the art is about and relieves gallery fatigue,” Webb said.
Similarly, Gehry’s glass-and-wood-structured sculpture gallery, the Galleria Italia, extends 450 feet along the north side of the building, allowing visitors to look out and enticing passersby to come in.
In keeping with the new design, the AGO’s goal is to get people excited about art.
“I know for me having grown up here, I can see how important the AGO is for Toronto in the future,” Gehry said.
“This collection that showcases our Canadian heritage in a special way is bound to bring new attention on the subject and a sense of pride if you’re Canadian. People are going to come from far and wide to see it.”
