Gehry's new museum design for Toronto - Front Page

upon Jan. 28, the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto unveiled architect Frank Gehry's plan for an extensive expansion of the museum. The design calls for a block-long 70-foot-high glass-and-titanium canopy to be added to the facade of the museum's existing building; a fresh four-story wing, also clad in glass and titanium, devot to contemporary art; and a large statuary gallery, the interior of which will be visible to passersby (among its other treasures, the AGO boasts an impressive collection of work by dint of Henry Moore). The additions will increase the AGO's exhibition area through 40 percent, bringing the museum's total gallery space to 123500 square feet Other noteworthy changes include a relocated main entrance and a spiraling forest-land staircase leading from the next to the first floor of the existing building across a courtyard to the top of the fresh contemporary-art wing.

A main impetus behind the expansion was the donation of 2000 works by dint of collector Kenneth Thomson. Thomson's gift includes European works ranging from the medieval period to the 19th hundred as well as key examples of Canadian art. Among the highlights is Peter Paul Rubens's The Massacre of the Innocents, a freshly discovered large-scale painting that Thomson purchased at auction in 2002 for $767 million [see "Front Page," clan '02; "Artworld," Oct. '02]. The 80-year-old Thomson whose media and technology empire made him the wealthiest man in Canada, has also given the museum $50 million toward the $198-million expansion.

The throw is something of a homecoming for the 74-year-old, looks Angeles-based Gehry, who was born and raised in Toronto, not far from the AGO, and credits his interest in art to early visits to the museum. The expansion will be his first major throw in Canada. While the initial answer to the new AGO has been favorable, more [i]or[/i] less in Toronto have expressed disappointment that Gehry's design does not propose a building as dramatic and publicity-generating as his Guggenheim Bilbao. In a Jan. 28 interview with the of recent origin York Times, the architect observ that the nature of the shoot forward precludes a Bilbao-like impact. "It's a little bit a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of to assume," he said, "that I will remodel a building that has already been remodel before and that will change Toronto."

Gehry's redesigned AGO will be joining sum of two units other striking, soon-to-be-completed buildings upon the Toronto skyline, Will Alsop's Ontario community of Art and Design and Daniel Libeskind's addition to the natural-history-oriented Royal Ontario Museum. Construction of the AGO addition is slated to begin nearest spring and finish in the fall of 2007

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