Posts from — May 2010

The Galleria Italia, the new Dundas St. facade of the Art Gallery of Ontario, designed by Frank Gehry.

A number of Vancouver councillors, in Toronto this week for the annual meeting of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, made a quick pilgrimage to the Art Gallery of Ontario, where a massive expansion project designed by starchitect Frank Gehry was completed in 2008.

Could the AGO project indicate ways to expand the Vancouver Art Gallery on its current site, as some have suggested? It was my first visit to the AGO in many years, and there’s no doubt it’s a spectacular new building, growing organically out of the original gallery in dramatic fashion.

But it seems clear that the key to the AGO expansion was one man: Lord Thomson of Fleet. Gallery after gallery holds the treasures accumulated by the world’s richest pack rat, who never seemed to buy one example of an artist’s work were 12 would do. One room’s walls were covered with empty frames, as if awaiting the proceeds of an uncompleted shopping trip.

The most pleasant find was a retrospective on the impact of Coach House Press on the Toronto art scene. Located in a small print shop in a tiny brick building off Bloor St., CHP provided a focal point for literary and artistic energy that included such luminaries as poet Michael Ondaatje and artist Greg Curnoe. (I briefly studied offset printing there in the 1970s, when photo offset technology was state of the art and the Internet had not been thought of.)

Curnoe, an avid cyclist who died after being hit by a car in 1992, was represented by his recreation of a vintage Zeus 10-speed.

60 Richmond St. E., an 84-unit co-op created as part of the Regent Park redevelopment, includes a partnership with the Toronto hospitality workers' union.

Today’s Globe and Mail features the bold transformation taking place in Toronto’s Regent Park, a downtown postwar public housing project that got everything wrong about urban renewal.

The first phase (of six) of this massive redevelopment is nearing completion, putting the city on track to replace more than 2,000 low-cost housing units without tenant dislocation.

The city is partnering with private sector developers to create a new mixed-use community, including market condominiums. Funds generated by the project are being invested in new housing both on the site and elsewhere. There is much here that could be applied to projects like Vancouver’s Little Mountain.

What the article missed was the novel approach to generating new, affordable housing for vital city workers in the hospitality industry who could never afford a condominium purchase, union wages notwithstanding.

When this concept was proposed for Vancouver’s market rental units at the Olympic Village, it confounded many Vancouver commentators, although it is commonplace at sophisticated cities around the world — and even in Whistler.

[Read more →]

The valiant group of artists who fought to maintain their space at 901 Main — and eventually moved out in the face of continued hostility from their landlord — are inviting the world to see the new space their co-operative has secured at 150 McLean at Powell.

The new studio promises to be a new focus for the East Side Cultural Crawl and next month’s open house will be a unique opportunity to sample the Crawl early.

In this morning’s mail, this intriguing find from Lynn Kisilenko: a plastic bridge, capable of supporting a battle tank, made almost entirely of recycled plastic bags.

Could it, she wonders, be converted to peaceful uses as a pedestrian bike bridge across False Creek, an idea that just won’t go away?

For this project, the US Army used ”94 percent recycled materials including glass, vehicle bumpers and about 85,000 pounds of high-density polyethylene plastic. That’s equivalent to about 550,000 one-gallon plastic milk jugs which, laid end-to-end, would extend nearly 82 miles.”

Why not a bridge with recycled tanks?