Despite moving through the rain and cold, despite having to travel down wooden ladders and through muddy puddles on the floor, the truth about the redesign of Toronto's Art Gallery of Ontario, I discovered, is not to be found stuffed into packing crates or hidden in clouds of plaster dust.
The truth is already plain to see: One year away from being completed, the Frank Gehry redesign is a staggering success.
True, Gehry's original design was worrisome for its heavy-handed treatment of both the front and back elevations. The back addition, to the south, was a cumbersome box, lording, like a dour Calvinist, over the pastoral landscape of Grange Park and the artful pyrotechnics of the Ontario College of Art & Design. The front was first imagined as an oppressive canopy in steel and glass running an entire city block along Dundas Street. But Gehry listened when the client asked for more.
Now, it's possible to be convinced of the great pleasures already being delivered by the project. More than two dozen curved columns - radials constructed of Douglas fir from Canada's West Coast - create the bones of a monumental second-storey glass promenade, setting up one of the many exhilarating stages Gehry has designed from which to experience the rooftops, the brickwork and, especially, the mess of people circulating through his old neighbourhood.
On the back side of the AGO, where the contemporary art galleries are contained, it was possible this week to step for the first time onto a seriously cantilevered spiral staircase - a barnacle of steel - which Gehry created to give movement and levity to the south tower. Okay, it was exposed, slippery and so tightly wound that it felt as if it could make a lot of snowboarders happy. But this is a coup for AGO director Matthew Teitelbaum, who says he feared the back end of the gallery looked overly static, and for an artists' advisory group who called for better movement between the contemporary-art floors.
The AGO's asymmetrical gesture - the unravelling of the creative mind, the organic inside of a sea shell - is a powerful counterpoint to the straight-laced Grange historic house that sits in the park below. And, importantly, it allows visitors to step out into the air onto a stage cantilevered 38 feet - more than 11 metres - out from the gallery, and hang there, before spiralling up or down between the fourth and fifth contemporary art floors.
In the coming weeks, panels of vibrant blue titanium will be folded onto the skin of the building, around the monumental glass-curtain wall, and applied so as to allow for a slight give, or pillowing. With this move, Gehry provides a permanent resting place for the shifting tones of a winter's sky; whereas, next door, British architect Will Alsop threw a palette of colours, to great effect, at OCAD's redesign. For people living in Winnipeg, it's possible to understand the electric moment when two rivers come together. As cities such as Toronto intensify and densify, the imperative for energizing the metropolis is found, increasingly, through the confluence of architecture.
Three years ago, it was a moot point whether the AGO would bother to play its new addition off the daring tabletop form of OCAD's Sharp Centre for Design. But time has passed, and Gehry's design has evolved. Now, the experience of Grange Park has been dramatically shifted by the bold framing offered by both institutions. There is nothing marginal or inconsequential about Toronto's new cultural district. The combined courage of both works of architecture has given a big-city feel to an otherwise forgotten park.
The Art Gallery of Ontario has come out of its shell. Through the leadership of many who toil there, from Teitelbaum to the curators and building project managers, a vision for an art gallery that will captivate and sustain the public interest has been nailed down. Though the gallery is expanding from 486,000 to 583,000 square feet, there is still a strong sense of intimacy that runs through it.
The back wall of the monumental promenade, named the Gallery Italia in honour of the 20 prominent Italian-Canadian families that each donated $500,000 to the cause, is lined in large panels of vertical-grain Douglas fir. It opposes the frenetic pace of city life with something slowed down and sumptuous. The floors within the gallery's expansive front lobby were initially specified as polished concrete, but, wanting more warmth, Teitelbaum called for a switch to white oak. Walnut flooring with moments of Spanish limestone will lead into the Thomson European collection and the Rubens masterpiece, The Massacre of the Innocents.
Enduring architecture requires a magical capturing of light. And, even on a dull winter's day during my visit to the AGO, it's possible to conclude that light has been captured and channelled in kind, gentle ways. There are five major skylights in the upper contemporary galleries and individual, canted skylights in the Thomson Canadian collections. They might have been value-engineered out, but Gehry stood by the need for natural light, as did his client. What they allow cannot be traded away: a chance for AGO visitors, for the first time, to experience art gently bathed in daylight. Even the Walker Court has been invigorated not only by the addition of the spiral "baroque" staircase but through a new glass peaked roof allowing light to flood what will become the gallery's public square.
Coming out of its shell means, also, that the AGO has relied on its own intimate knowledge of its collections. To that end, decisions about how to celebrate the existing collection and the donated, wondrous collections of the late Kenneth Thomson have been made in-house. An outsider agency was not hired, the way the Royal Ontario Museum appointed the British exhibition designers, Haley Sharpe, to decide how to display the artifacts. Instead, AGO curators decided on the kind of building that would most enhance their collections, rather than being required, late in the game, to stuff the stuff into an architect's version of a large piece of sculpture.
There are tremendous rewards to be gained from meticulous planning. For several months, AGO installation directors and curators have been working with foam-core models to test the placement of paintings and objects. At one point, a team from the gallery, and including a guest curator from the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England, assembled at Gehry's Los Angeles studios to lay out full-size mockups of the ship-model gallery - part of the Thomson collection - with pictures of about 100 ships mounted on foam core to be positioned and repositioned. With that information, the Gehry team of designers went ahead to design display cases with glass tops, inspired by the chop of the sea, that curve both vertically and horizontally.
The same kind of process was repeated for the European collections. How individual objects are to be lit has been studied and tested so that, even with shelving, there is a guarantee of the clear passage of light.
Is Gehry invincible? Hardly. His reputation is only as good as his last work. The fact that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is suing Gehry's office for "providing deficient design services and drawings" (MIT is also suing the construction company, Skanska USA Building Inc.) might have pushed a dark cloud over the AGO redevelopment. The lawsuit claims that there have been leaks, mould, falling ice, and cracks in masonry since the $278-million Ray and Maria Stata Center for Computer, Information and Intelligence Sciences opened in 2004.
Can we expect ice to drop to the sidewalk from the AGO's beautiful curved promenade, or mildew to climb the freshly appointed walls? It seems unlikely. That's because the AGO, in a plodding, meticulous way, established processes that mitigate the risk of a newly constructed, crumbling building. Early on, a building committee, with knowledgeable mega-builders such as Murray Frum, Jack Rabinovitch and renowned structural engineer Morden Yolles, was established. On their advice, a building-envelope consultant - the guys who test a glass wall for potential leakage - was hired; the general contractor, EllisDon Corp., has been a steady, involved player during the evolution of the design. And outside inspectors were brought into the construction site on a regular basis - it's possible to see the sign-off signatures of two separate inspectors on the welded joints required for the indoor and outdoor spiralling staircases.
To date, $225-million has been raised of a total budget of $254-million for the AGO redevelopment. That's a lot of dough dedicated to the enterprise of architecture, surely the riskiest of the arts.
Money well spent? Let me count the ways.
In a town of many maturing riches and burgeoning big-city aspirations, money is being thrown at all kinds of cultural-renaissance ventures. Sometimes, despite all the hoopla, the payback can be rather thin. But as transformations go, the AGO deserves some special recognition for framing art within a memorable experience of architecture. It only makes sense to please the customer, because, guess what, the customer knows best.