Today on the Scroll: Local hero of the weekend, Frank Gehry, is being lauded everywhere for redefining the Art Gallery of Ontario in the neighbourhood where he grew up — and left behind over 60 years ago. Childhood memories of the gallery and its surroundings played a large part in shaping new ideas, he told a media throng yesterday, risking his reputation as the starchitect who refuses to cast too sentimental a shadow. Consider how Gehry spoke about Santa Monica Place, the shopping mall that opened in 1980, in Sketches of Frank Gehry.
The only reason he took on the job, Gehry explained to director Sydney Pollack in the 2005 documentary, was because he needed to earn a living.
Santa Monica Place — whose Hollywood location made it a perfect interior for Pretty in Pink, episodes of Beverly Hills 90210, and Terminator 2: Judgement Day — closed in January and was torn down in April, to be replaced by a cluster of retailers old and new.
Gehry declined to comment on the decision. But feelings were already on the record. Since then, he’s been out of the business of buildings constructed solely for the purpose of selling people more stuff.
When a 79-year-old is sharing the limelight with the pretension associated with raising millions for a gallery — in this case, personified by the AGO CEO Matthew Teitelbaum — he can’t help but seem more honest.
The fact that Gehry’s homecoming didn’t involve an entirely original building — rather one built before he was born and expanded several times since — generated skepticism that he remains determined to debunk.
While the assumption is that a $276-million building is conceivably there forever, Gehry might have been the only person gathered in Walker Court imagining the possibility of otherwise, especially given recent travails surrounding several squiggles — summed up in the recent Maclean’s story, “Frank Gehry’s really bad year.”
Not that he complained about a suburban-style mall associated with his legacy meeting a wrecking ball. The most notable virtue of the new AGO, demanding a friendlier relationship with its hostile intersection and points beyond, is exactly what was lacking at Santa Monica Place.
The renovation is due to rectify those issues, by providing a view of the ocean from a rooftop restaurant, while signifying the end of the era when shopping centres across North America were built to focus inward.
Earlier his week, when Fairview Mall cut the ribbon on a $90-million renovation, it’s safe to say none of the 300 elitist hacks turning out for the AGO launch considered it newsworthy, despite a press release touting “contemporary lounge furniture, zen-like fountains, and extensive landscaping resulting in 230,000 square feet of change.” In fact, despite being more accessible and appealing to the masses than the $18-admission AGO, it received no press coverage whatsoever. Fairview, at the corner of Don Mills Road and Sheppard Avenue, opened as functionally suburban in 1972, and subject to a gaudy glam makeover in 1988.
But unlike the nearby Don Mills Centre, whose site is getting a similar post-demolition fate as Santa Monica Place — much to the chagrin of aging neighbours fond of climate-controlled sidewalks — corporate co-owners Cadillac Fairview and Ivanhoe Cambridge are stuck with Fairview Mall’s aesthetically outmoded structure. For now, a location of The Apple Store seems a quick fix to give a covered mall a certain cachet, as the department stores once counted on to provide an anchor of stability grapple with their own self-worth.
The transformed AGO’s titanium blue tower overlooking Grange Park, however, gives the gallery the same kind of comforting big-box definition once represented by a Simpsons or Eaton’s store — and today, in the case of Fairview, the Bay and Sears. During the Q&A session, Gehry wished for more that would do appreciation of his building justice, such as having it bookended by coffee bars.
So while Gehry reflected upon the idea that another architect will be given license to improve upon his design – something he intends to be perfectly accepting of “if I’m still around” — the consensus reaction is that nobody would ever dare. The accolades for the AGO are also proving to be the deathblow for any remaining goodwill surrounding the Royal Ontario Museum’s Crystal, as Globe and Mail architecture critic Lisa Rochon’s guesstimate that most of us will live to see Daniel Libeskind’s design sandblasted out of its misery.
Frank Gehry. Meanwhile, gets to write the final draft of Toronto’s 2000s cultural renaissance. And none of this would have happened if he didn’t grow up in a row house where entertainment was provided by building cities out of scraps of wood, watching live carp purchased in Kensington Market flop around his grandmother’s bathtub before being cooked — a sight he credits as an artistic inspiration — and sneak into a lecture at the University of Toronto which seeded the idea that he could someday be an architect.
The story becomes even more resonant when compared to the legacy of the late Ken Thomson, the newspaper baron son of a newspaper baron, credited with setting Gehry up with this acclaimed homecoming.
Maybe it’s best to get these buildings finished before they end up in the hands of those for whom childhood memories involve loafing around a food court.
scroll@eyeweekly.com