13 May 2012:

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This building is looking crazy good!
 
Towered said:
Wow, we get curved glass here but not at our Gehry. That's messed.
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Still, the AGO looks great. While the Dundas facade is mostly composed of flat glass mounted on angles to appear to curve, the two elements which appear separate from the main glass facade and whimsically tacked are elegant in their curves.
 
I thought Gehry used the canopy just to be sure that no one could see any part of the building by his arch-enemy Barton Myers.
 
No. Gehry had the Myers/KPMB addition along Dundas dismantled, and the Tanenbaum sculpture atrium ( one of the AGO's finest rooms, just north of the Grange ) severely compromised in order to squeeze in two banks of elevators. Though some of the the Parkin galleries remain at the Dundas end of the building, Gehry renovated the Henry Moore gallery ( which used to be a destination gallery, with one entrance/exit, and had design input from Moore himself ) so that it doubles as a walkway through to the Galleria Italia. The inward-looking Galleria, which bears no design relationship to anything else in the AGO, is the sort of "big statement" one expects from a famous starchitect: the wide B.C. douglas fir beams are carefully arranged along the curve of the space to create an overlapping effect, so that when you look along it views of the city are blocked; Gehry also wanted to extend the horizontal wooden louvres that run along the Galleria windows further down into the space but the AGO said "no".
 
Urban Shocker said:
Though some of the the Parkin galleries remain at the Dundas end of the building, Gehry renovated the Henry Moore gallery ( which used to be a destination gallery, with one entrance/exit, and had design input from Moore himself ) so that it doubles as a walkway through to the Galleria Italia.
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Though an interesting vindication of Parkin's functionalism to consider is that it's in those concrete-beamed spaces where all the Big Exhibitions tend to occur, like the present Picasso show (and an interesting affirmation of Gehry's desecration is in how the Moore gallery has been in part co-opted for said show)

(Edit: the big *mainstream blockbuster* shows. Whereas the big shows way up in Gehry's blue box tend to have more, for lack of a better word, "camp appeal"...)
 
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If you made it through all of the scaffolding in Part 1 of our SickKids tour, you'll be happy to hear we are scaffolding-free in Part 2, where we explore the atria going up the east side of the project.

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The view looking north to Lumiere and Burano is amazing!!!
 
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