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June 12, 2009
A gallery with a twist
Gehry's addition to AGO inspires in its scope.
BAILA LAZARUS
Walking up the winding staircase in Toronto's Art Gallery of Ontario, new stunning views greet me around every turn.
They're not views to the outside or even to the displays on the floor below and around me, they're sights of the staircase passing under an archway or meandering past a giant truss. It's like walking inside a sculpture.
"It's so perfect the way he integrated the new design with the original space," my tour guide, architect and urban designer Joanne Leung, said with a flourish of her hand. "They just took such good care mixing the old and the new."
The "he" she was referring to is internationally renowned architect Frank Gehry, and the "new" she was waving at is the recent addition that has taken a classical-style building and brought it beautifully into the 21st century.
Gehry is an L.A.-based architect who was born into a Polish Jewish family in Toronto during the Depression. He moved to Los Angeles in 1947 and received his bachelor of architecture from the University of Southern California in 1954. Over the past half century, he has developed a reputation for outlandish and often controversial structures and has deposited his distinctive, surreal designs all over the world, including Dancing House in Prague, Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.
In the AGO project, Gehry was dealing with a $276 million renovation/expansion of an original structure dating back to 1918, along with various additions that had come along over the years. The first of Gehry's unique designs that you notice walking into the renovated AGO is the staircase.
Made out of glue-laminated (glulam) beams and rising five storeys, the stair is the centrepiece of the gallery's rotunda, twisting and turning like a small intestine. It takes something to climb from bottom to top, but the effort is well worth it.
As beautiful as the central stair is, the highlight of the new addition is the building-length European-style Galleria Italia, which boasts 20-inch-deep glulam beams rising, curving and torquing four storeys high.
Even if you aren't as big a fan of glulam structures as I am (I fell in love with them when I wrote about Har El Synagogue's new building in West Vancouver), it's hard not to appreciate the dramatic sweeping curves and what it must have taken in technical specification to design and build them. They not only arch floor to ceiling, they bend toward the east and twist to follow the curve of the galleria. It's truly an awe-inspiring feat of architecture.
"The context, too – how it relates to the Victorian houses across the street – it's not overwhelming," said Leung, as we walked along the galleria catching views of the red brick buildings that line Dundas. "The craftsmanship is fantastic."
To match the glulam stair and galleria, similarly designed furniture pops up sporadically throughout the structure, bringing the materials to a human scale.
In the back, or south side, of the building, another small staircase pokes out of the building between the fourth and fifth floors, suspended over the park below like a small, curly tail. Though this extra staircase is unnecessary, it engages the people in the square below, Leung explained, as though giving passers-by a piece of artwork to see from the outside. It also offers stunning views of the modernist Ontario College of Art and Design down the block and the CN Tower in the distance.
Now, lest it be said that I was too caught up gawking at the structure of the art gallery to appreciate its contents, I should mention that I did stop to view the artwork now and then.
With 70,000 works in its collection, it would be hard to summarize them all here, but some of the highlights for me were the multi-room exhibit of the Group of Seven, a collection of "Surreal Things" and a display of original casts used by Henry Moore (known for his controversial "Three Way Piece No. 2" ["The Archer"], which was erected in Toronto City Hall Plaza). For those interested in shipbuilding, an exhibit downstairs has stunning scale models of Russian icebreakers, British mud-hoppers and French steam tugs, among others, a tribute to the shipbuilding industry in Scotland and England.
If visiting Toronto this summer, include the AGO in your itinerary, and be sure to wear comfortable shoes. The gallery is open Saturday, Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m.; Wednesday: 10 a.m.-8:30 p.m.; closed on Mondays. Admission is $18 for adults; $15 for seniors; $10 for students and youth; and free for children five and under. (Not all exhibits included in entry fees on certain nights.)
Baila Lazarus is a freelance writer, painter and photographer. Her work can be seen at www.orchiddesigns.net.
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