It’s been a decade since Toronto’s building boom — which saw cultural institutions such as the ROM, the National Ballet School, the Toronto Film Festival, and OCAD, among others — transform the city with new works of architecture. Chief among these new buildings was the Art Gallery of Ontario, whose Frank Gehry-designed expansion was completed in 2008.

So how is the addition holding up? The Toronto Star spoke to AGO employees and local architects — including Daniels Faculty Dean Richard Sommer — about the transformation and how it came to be.
 

Writes Nick Patch:

Compared to the audacious scratch-made classics Gehry had recently turned out to worldwide acclaim — 1997’s astonishing Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, of course, or 2003’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles — he was going to be, in some ways, restrained simply based on the realities of the site.

Yet several critics now believe those limiting circumstances ultimately benefited the project.

“Gehry was doing extremely high-budget, big-gesture projects at that point in his career, and this one didn’t allow for that,” said Richard Sommer, dean of the University of Toronto’s Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design. “He’s sometimes at his best when he has to do something scrappier.”
 

Visit the Toronto Star’s website to read the full article “Frank Gehry’s gift to Toronto gets better with age.”