While architect Frank Gehry is renowned for his sculptural approach to building design, he is also well known for making buildings that have a positive impact on the lives of people within their community. Next February gallery visitors will get a glimpse of some of the forces that have helped to shape Gehry’s design for the transformed AGO – and what impact this design will have on our AGO community, through the exhibition Frank Gehry: Art + Architecture, February 18 to May 7, 2006.
Four of Gehry’s recent projects completed within the last decade will be featured – the Ray and Maria Stata Center, Boston (MIT); Millennium Park Music Pavilion and Great Lawn, Chicago; Walt Disney Concert Hall, LA; the D.Z. Bank in Berlin; together with the transformed Art Gallery of Ontario of 2008. While each of these projects has influenced the design for the new AGO, each has also made a significant impact on its surrounding community.
Aside from its striking exterior, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles is one of the most acoustically sophisticated concert halls in the world, clearly addressing its public function. While the DZ Bank Building exterior follows strict Berlin building codes, its imposing, unadorned façade conceals a gargantuan, floating structure containing the bank’s conference facility and a ten-storey atrium that is flooded with light from the intricate roof of glass and steel.
The Ray and Maria Stata Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has provided a dynamic and inviting space that addresses the needs of its two distinct client groups – students and researchers. Through Gehry’s inventive design, communication between these two historically isolated groups has been achieved.
The Millennium Park Music Pavilion and Great Lawn in Chicago is the centerpiece of a huge cultural facility designed to serve cultural needs of both the city’s diverse population and its tourists. Millennium Park provides a new home for the Grant Park Philharmonic, as well as a broad range of musical experiences that are offered free to residents and visitors.
Some of the many facets of Gehry’s unique working process will be explored – learning about clients needs, assessing the community in which the building will function, developing massing models, creating forms that will bring life into the building, bringing architecture and engineering together through computer imaging, and selecting materials – through architectural models, photographs, audio and visual testimony, and interactive activities to engage visitors.
As we continue to undergo construction, this exhibition provides a unique opportunity to share with our visitors that Transformation AGO is an exciting innovation informed by Gehry’s past achievements. While the show underlines the significance of the AGO as the first Gehry project in Canada – appropriately in Toronto, the place of his birth – it also addresses the repositioning of Toronto’s most important visual culture institution on the international stage.
“This exhibition will provide an exciting opportunity to witness the creative sensibility and ideas of the greatest architect of the second half of the twentieth century,” said Dennis Reid, the AGO’s director of collections & research and senior curator, Canadian art. “Visitors will be able to experience the scale and feel of Transformation AGO, and to understand its key role in Gehry’s evolution a full two years before its completion.”
You might also like:
- AGO Podcast #12 – Frank Gehry: Art + Architecture – Described by Larry Richards, Professor of Architecture, University of Toronto
- Photoblogging at the media preview for Frank Gehry: Art + Architecture
- AGO Podcast #9 – Transformation AGO: Frank Gehry interviewed by Christopher Hume
- Live Blogging from the AGO – Frank Gehry Launch
- Gehry live from the Art Gallery of Ontario