Toronto’s ongoing creative transformation is coming more fully into view. This week saw the opening of Frank Gehry’s newly renovated Art Gallery of Ontario.

(Photo via AGO).

I was there for the opening (full disclosure: I serve on the board) and the building is beyond spectacular in the way it activates the art, stitches together old buildings and reanimates old spaces, and relates to the messy urbanist neighborhood which surrounds. Here’s what the NYT has to say;

Frank Gehry has often said that he likes to forge deep emotional bonds with his architecture projects. But the commission to renovate the Art Gallery of Ontario here must have been especially fraught for him. Mr. Gehry grew up on a windy, tree-lined street in a working-class neighborhood not far from the museum. His grandmother lived around the corner, where she kept live carp handy in the bathtub for making her gefilte fish. Given that this is Mr. Gehry’s first commission in his native city, you might expect the building to be a surreal kind of self-reckoning, a voyage through the architect’s subconscious. So the new Art Gallery of Ontario, which opened to the public on Friday, may catch some fans of the architect off guard.

Rather than a tumultuous creation, this may be one of Mr. Gehry’s most gentle and self-possessed designs. It is not a perfect building, yet its billowing glass facade, which evokes a crystal ship drifting through the city, is a masterly example of how to breathe life into a staid old structure. And its interiors underscore one of the most underrated dimensions of Mr. Gehry’s immense talent: a supple feel for context and an ability to balance exuberance with delicious moments of restraint. Instead of tearing apart the old museum, Mr. Gehry carefully threaded new ramps, walkways and stairs through the original. As you step from one area to the next, it is as if you were engaging in a playful dance between old and new.

But that’s not all. Earlier this month, Toronto’s Artscape unveiled its transformation of Toronto’s old street car repair barns into an urban park plus work-live space for artists and creators.

(Photo via Blog TO)

The project is an amazing example of creative, sustainable, and inclusive adaptive reuse. Rana and I were blown away when we saw the project as host of its opening night. The Globe and Mail reports:

The reinvention of the old Toronto Transit Commission streetcar-maintenance sheds in the St. Clair-Wychwood area of the city will banish forever your spontaneous, ill-considered desire to damn all urbanity … [T]his is a chance to feast on a version of urban heaven, a wondrous, hybridized redevelopment of something that had been left for 30 years to die a slow death. The Artscape Wychwood Barns, which open to the public this week, give us a new kind of temple in which art, community and urban agriculture are allowed to happily conspire … This is not to say that the barns will replace such major destinations as the Art Gallery of Ontario or the Royal Ontario Museum … The compelling city allows for an intermingling of all creative players. And it’s that potent mix which inspires us to stay.

Exactly. Artscape founder Tim Jones likes to say the city’s ongoing transformation involves the simultaneous recognition of the need both to put creativity on display and to more fully engage creativity at work. These two projects are part of that unfolding process to celebrate and harness creativity in a sustainable and inclusive way.

The two exhibitions, Aaron Betsky’s “Out There: Architecture Beyond Building” and Francesco Garofalo’s “Housing Italy,” in the Arsenale for the Venice 2008 Biennale could not be more diametrically opposed in terms of their positions in contemporary architectural practice today.

The Betsky-curated exhibition brings together signature installations by branded global architects such as Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, and Coop Himmelblau as well as by emerging and polemic designers such as Philippe Rahn, An Te Liu, MVRDV, and others in an array of digital media, fabrication technologies, and construction.

We stop at Diller and Scofidio’s video which presents views if the Venices of world – Italy, Las Vegas, and Macao – from a gondola. Perfectly positioned to stem the flow of visitors, it provokes us to question the meaning of where we are.

After being super-saturated with stimuli including the 360 degree dance/pleasure/lounge of Nigel Coates, we arrive abruptly at “Housing Italy” in the Italian Hall at the terminus of the Arsenale. Garofalo has traced the history of housing as the central project of modern architecture in Italy through the discourse of the Italian media along the perimeter walls.  Twelve selected design teams responded to his invitation to make speculative projects addressing urgent issues of housing in Italy today, ranging from social implications, cultural identity, forms, availability, to affordability. Not a single computer-generated image exists in this exhibition: a deliberate decision to return architecture and its formation to acts of thinking, drawing, and model building. One of the exhibition’s most engaging projects re-inhabits the skeleton of an uncompleted Aldo Rossi building for affordable multiple residential units, cleverly playing with a colorful kit of toy-block infill components.

The projects present contemporary thinking about the possibilities of providing housing for everyone. The future of accommodation is addressed by an animated video in a stand-alone theatre; it presents the challenging statistics of the magnitude of the ongoing problem, ironically, through the work of an MTV video producer.

Later, in conversation with Garofalo, I learn that a high-ranking government official toured the exhibition and was inspired to go back to the Italian government with a proposal for a new program to address the urgent housing questions.

The Italian press responds to the two Arsenale exhibitions by choosing sides: they champion Garofalo’s exhibition, generating a debate and a degree of tension even before the exhibitions were opened to the public.

Not only does the dichotomy of Garofalo and Betsky focus the realities of the existing and growing gap in the practice of architecture today – represented on one hand by the Italians for whom building is and will always be the fundamental outcome of the architectural project; and on the other, architecture as a project of research, experimentation, and development. Betsky’s position is valid on one hand – in his words, architecture “must go beyond buildings because buildings are not enough. They are big and wasteful accumulations of natural resources that are difficult to adapt to the continually changing conditions of modern life.” Ironically, in this era of global instability catalysed in large part by the sub-prime mortgage crisis in the States, Garofolo’s project – which offers concrete solutions to a major social problem - is equally timely and relevant. Installations exhilarate , while Housing Italy sobers and gives hope.

In the aftermath of our odyssey through the Arsenale, the oppositions seem extreme and it is difficult to see how on one hand ground level problem-solving and experimental formalism can be integrated. Yet I believe the future of contemporary architectural practice can move forward in a positive direction when these opposable forces- substance and style – are brought together through dialogue and interaction to lead to an integrated synthesis and previously unimagined solutions. This is critical, especially if, in Betsky’s words, “the role of architecture is to make us feel at home in this challenging world.”

*Photographic Credit: Taken from Flickr account members, tom$ and dysturb

Seems the sixties and the hippie movement around the Bay Area had a big impact on architectural innovation a la Frank Gehry and Rem Koolhaas, as well as music, popular culture, food (Alice Waters), and technology. Zahid Sardar, writing in the San Francisco Gate, reviews Alastair Gordon’s new book, Spaced Out: Crash Pads, Hippie Communes, Infinity Machines, and Other Radical Environments of the Psychedelic Sixties. Creativity requires self-expression. It also appears to arise in clumps or clusters, not just in time but in space.

Gordon’s research makes it clear that the ’60s generated many of the ideas about recycling and protecting the environment that we consider normal today … [T]he ’60s may have inspired the most visually arresting buildings by some of the most celebrated and visionary architects today.

Some of those unconventional buildings, it turns out, were created because the amateur builders could not quite figure out how to construct Fuller’s dome of conjoined triangular components. Nevertheless, you might see links between those forms and the wild imaginings of architect Eric Owen Moss in Culver City; Frank Gehry’s roof forms for the Bilbao Museum Guggenheim and the twisting, shiny Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles; the wacky, wonderful main library in Seattle by Rem Koolhaas; and even the Federal Building in San Francisco by Thom Mayne.

What other areas of the U.S. seem to have been affected architecturally by the hippie movement?

David Galenson, the University of Chicago economist who has written on the difference between conceptual (read: young) and pragmatic (that is, older) creatives, has a new paper on architects at the National Bureau of Economic Research (via Freakonomics):

A survey of textbooks reveals that Le Corbusier was the greatest architect of the twentieth century, followed by Frank Lloyd Wright and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The same evidence shows that the greatest architects alive today are Frank Gehry and Renzo Piano. Scholars have long been aware of the differing approaches of architects who have embraced geometry and those who have been inspired by nature, but they have never compared the life cycles of these two groups. The present study demonstrates that, as in other arts, conceptual architects have made their greatest innovations early in their careers, whereas experimental architects have done their most important work late in their lives. Remarkably, the experimentalists Le Corbusier and Frank Gehry designed their greatest buildings after the age of 60, and Frank Lloyd Wright designed his after 70.

I recently had dinner with Gehry who is designing our new building for the Art Galley of Ontario and someone asked him who were his favorite younger architects. He hesitated. I remember thinking at the time: architects only become successful after fairly long careers. He then hesitatingly responded: “Rem Koolhaus and Zaha Hadid.” They still have plenty of time to join the rank of star-chitects