Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO)
Gehry, Frank Owen
Download1A1-GF-AGO-A57_cp.jpg (287.9Kb)
Alternative Titles
Musée des beaux-arts de l'Ontario
Transformation AGO
Date
2013-07-25Description
Detail of steel supports for facade; The Art Gallery of Ontario was established in 1900 (as the Art Museum of Toronto). Building at the current location was begun in 1910. The AGO embarked on a $254 million (later increased to $276 million) redevelopment plan by architect Frank Gehry in 2004, called Transformation AGO. The new addition would require demolition of the 1992 Post-Modernist wing by Barton Myers and Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blumberg Architects (KPMB). Although Gehry was born in Toronto, and as a child had lived in the same neighbourhood as the AGO, the expansion of the gallery represented his first work in Canada. Gehry was commissioned to expand and revitalize the AGO, not to design a new building; as such, one of the challenges he faced was to unite the disparate areas of the building that had become a bit of a "hodgepodge" after six previous expansions dating back to the 1920s. The AGO reopened in November 2008, with the transformation project having increased the art viewing space by 47%. Source: Wikipedia; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page (accessed 4/22/2011)
Type of Work
art museumSubject
architecture, contemporary (1960 to present), Art museums, adaptive re-use, Twenty-first century
Rights
Rights Statement
Licensed for educational and research use by the MIT community only