A wooden staircase in the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, designed by architect Frank Gehry, in November, 2008.NATHAN DENETTE/The Canadian Press
Frank Gehry died this month at the age of 96. Let’s hope the era of the “starchitect” dies with him.
The term was coined to describe the superstar architects whose work everyone simply had to have. Mr. Gehry was the prime example. His Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain drew millions of tourists to see its sweeping, swirling form when it opened in 1997. The Toronto-born Mr. Gehry became perhaps the world’s most sought-after architect.
But not all of his creations were such a success. Consider his renovation of Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario. Mr. Gehry slapped a huge visor of wood and glass on its façade. Dramatic, no doubt, when he showed a model to the benefactors, who would have looked down on it from above.
The trouble is that no one in real life ever sees it that way. The AGO sits on a narrow downtown street: Dundas. When you pass it by car, streetcar or on foot, the visor looms over you, its sculptural virtues all but invisible.
People line up to see the newly transformed Art Gallery of Ontario in November, 2008.Arantxa Cedillo/Veras/The Globe and Mail
The lobby is another disappointment. With its low ceiling and curving ramp in blonde wood, it feels cramped. The big, modern lobby in the building’s previous pre-Gehry form conveyed a much better sense of arrival.
Then there is Mr. Gehry’s greatest crime: the sinuous spiral staircase, framed in more blonde wood, that takes visitors to the upper galleries. Brilliant, everybody said when it was unveiled. Iconic. Inspired. The trouble is that it ruined one of the loveliest spaces in the city: Walker Court, with its classical proportions and arched entryways. The staircase juts up through it, crying “look at me.”
The other outstanding example of starchitecture in Toronto is an even greater failure. Daniel Libeskind famously drew the design for an addition to the Royal Ontario Museum on a napkin after touring the ROM’s gem and mineral gallery. The result was the “crystal,” a spiky monstrosity slapped onto the north end of the original stone building.
ROM unveils $130-million plan to turn controversial Crystal into a more open, welcoming space
With all its crazy angles, it was a nightmare to build, adding many millions to the cost. Worse, without vertical walls or sensibly shaped rooms, it is a terrible place for what museums are meant to do: display art and objects. The ROM is now spending $130-million to correct some of the mistakes of the last reno. It will replace the weird Bloor Street entrance, which had even less a sense of arrival than the AGO’s, add an arty interior staircase and redo much of the gallery space.
It would have made far more sense to admit that the crystal was a disaster and rip the damned thing out, but that would have meant telling all the donors who paid for it that the ROM had been bamboozled by a big-name architect with a napkin doodle.
I once asked Jack Diamond, architect of the lovely Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts in Toronto, what he thought about the new ROM. He arched one of his majestic eyebrows and said, “form follows function.” The ROM not only ignored that old architectural adage; it turned it on its head.
Hiring a big-name architect with a bold idea isn’t always a bad thing. It worked when Toronto-Dominion Bank hired Ludwig Mies van der Rohe to design a complex of handsome skyscrapers in the heart of downtown. It worked when Santiago Calatrava won a competition to build an atrium – the soaring Galleria – to link a couple of Toronto office towers. It worked when Toronto chose Finnish modernist Viljo Revell to create a new City Hall, to this day part of the city’s international image.
The trouble comes when the clients are so overawed that they fail to ask questions of their architect for fear of coming across as rubes. A crystal? Cool, Daniel, but where will we put the dinosaurs? Nice façade, Frank, but who apart from seagulls will see it?
A city with a shaky sense of self and a desperate desire to be seen as world-class is especially prone to tug its forelock in the presence of purported architectural genius. Next time a starchitect comes along with a goofy idea, Toronto should show a little confidence and say no, thank you.