Fourth in a series taking a second look at Toronto’s architectural showpieces 10 years after the building boom.

It’s hard to imagine that anyone — including perhaps Frank Gehry himself — knows the Art Gallery of Ontario quite as intimately as Roman Baron.

After all, he’s worked security at the AGO for 28 years, ever since he was an OCAD student double-majoring in fine arts and photography who spent so much time in the gallery next door gazing at Emily Carr paintings or a memorable Jacques Lipchitz exhibit that he eventually figured he might as well work there.

In the nearly three decades since, Baron was there to see the post-modernist wing by Barton Myers and KPMB Architects erected in 1992 and demolished a little over a decade later, and he was of course also there to witness every step in the construction of Gehry’s expansion until its November 2008 opening. He remembers the “adrenaline rush” of that opening weekend, how when he finally took a break, he wandered outside to see a line stretching down McCaul Street from Dundas to Queen and wondered: “How come there’s no end to this?”

Hype, of course, subsides, but Baron’s enthusiasm for the building hasn’t. Commuting two hours each way from St. Catharines every day, the 48-year-old father of three looks at the building with a parent’s pride.

“Over the years, that feeling has just really sunk in how lucky I am to work in such a beautiful building,” Baron said. “The building has been finished but the kudos just keep coming. Some people have come back 10 or 15 times and they’re still overwhelmed by unique spaces they didn’t discover the first times they were here.

“I’m a huge fan,” he added. “I don’t think you could have done anything to make it more beautiful or even more bold.”

At the time of its opening, Torontonians were just as unguarded in their giddy pride over Gehry’s grand homecoming monument.

The Star’s Christopher Hume declared the $306 million revamped AGO “the easiest, most effortless and relaxed architectural masterpiece this city has seen,” while The Globe and Mail’s headline trumpeted “a monumental moment.”

By then, it had been eight years since AGO director and CEO Matthew Teitelbaum, Frank Gehry and Ken Thomson first met in May 2000 to discuss what would become known as Transformation AGO. As fundraising churned ahead, AGO leadership spent a year “soul-searching” until they assembled a 12-point priority checklist, which included improving flow between galleries, creating more space for art, re-establishing Walker Court’s central prominence, and creating a “cultural landmark” in the city, recalls Mike Mahoney, the AGO’s executive director of corporate special projects and director of building operations.

Gallery leadership also wanted to respect previous transformations, a challenge given that since first shifting to its current location in the early 1910s, the AGO had been subject to a series of expansions and reinventions authored by different architects.

“It’s very difficult to create significant great architecture when there’s been previous architects working on the building over the past 100 years,” Mahoney said.

Compared to the audacious scratch-made classics Gehry had recently turned out to worldwide acclaim — 1997’s astonishing Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, of course, or 2003’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles — he was going to be, in some ways, restrained simply based on the realities of the site.

Yet several critics now believe those limiting circumstances ultimately benefited the project.

“Gehry was doing extremely high-budget, big-gesture projects at that point in his career, and this one didn’t allow for that,” said Richard Sommer, dean of the University of Toronto’s Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design. “He’s sometimes at his best when he has to do something scrappier.”

“It’s a very successful project and I find it interesting that people have been critical of it for not being Gehry-esque enough or more spectacular. I see that as a plus,” agreed Marco Polo, former editor of Canadian Architect magazine and professor in Ryerson University’s department of architectural science.

“What you get is a building that has a few really expressive gestures, but the expressive gestures don’t overwhelm the project.”

Subtle though it might be, Gehry’s reinvention was rich in enchanting features: the airy Galleria Italia framed by glue-laminated Douglas-fir timbers; the newly resplendent Walker Court, restored to well-deserved central prominence; and the slithering staircase at the centre.

The new AGO has certainly seemed to carry a persuasive sway over tourists. In 2004-05, the final year of full operations before the gallery began closing public spaces for renovation, the AGO drew 665,425 visitors. For the most recent fiscal year, that number had leapt to 965,689. Part of the draw might be the building itself and another might be the blockbuster exhibits the new space has made possible, including popular showcases featuring Ai Weiwei, David Bowie, Lawren Harris and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

If there’s a criticism still lingering around Gehry’s AGO, it’s that the gallery spaces still don’t flow with fluidity. The Wall Street Journal wrote of the pre-Gehry gallery that “getting lost at the AGO, which inevitably happened, was confusing, often annoying.” Some would argue that Gehry’s redesign didn’t resolve the issue.

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“The challenge of that project had to do with the way in which its funding model required a lot of very discrete galleries,” said Sommer. “I think that the gallery experience is a bit too discontinuous.”

Baron, meanwhile, finds visitors are typically more overwhelmed by the building’s beauty than its layout. One such awestruck visitor? Robert De Niro.

Baron recalls that the actor was one of several celebrities to visit the AGO’s 2010 Julian Schnabel exhibit. One aim of the reinvented AGO was to reflect the wonders of the neighbourhood (especially now that the revitalized Grange Park has been opened), and Baron indeed recalls De Niro pausing to admire the AGO’s surroundings and marvel at the rate of development in Toronto; he actually counted the cranes nearby.

Eventually, the Goodfellas star was running late, and sleek SUVs arrived to whisk him away. But he wasn’t done exploring. Outside, De Niro asked Baron if he could take an up-close look at the front façade, having only gazed at it in passing. Eyes fixated up on the building, De Niro slowly wandered into the road to get a better look. Suddenly, a streetcar began shuttling down the street “extremely quickly” toward the two-time Oscar winner, and Baron got nervous.

“I said, ‘Mr. De Niro, the streetcar is approaching really quickly. You better be careful,’” he recalled. “He says to me in his New York accent: ‘It’s all right. I’m a New Yorker.’

“He was fearless. He saw the streetcar coming and still had another glance at the architecture. He didn’t step back until it was two or three metres away.”

Facts and Figures

Gehry’s redesign added 97,000 square feet of newly built space, allowing for the addition of thousands of works including the Thomson Collection.

The glass-and-wood façade spans 600 feet along Dundas Street and soars 70 feet above street level, while the sculpture gallery extends 450 feet along the north side of the building.

In total, the building size increased by 20 per cent.

Art viewing space increased by 47 per cent and total gallery space by 129,000 net square feet.

The first Transformation AGO Open House for the public on January 22, 2003 drew more than 2,400 people.

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