When the news came out over the weekend about the new development from David Mirvish proposed for the Entertainment district in Toronto, a lot of people looked at the model of the complex designed by star architect Frank Gehry and said to themselves: “Um.”
I’m sorry I can’t recall who deployed it, but the phrase “take-out container” made its way into my Twitter feed. But before anyone draws any final aesthetic conclusions, we all might recall that when Frank Gehry unveiled his big plan for the Art Gallery of Ontario renovation a few years ago, his sketch that made the front page of the newspapers looked like this:
And the magnificent building we wound up with in that case looks like this.
Which is not to offer a judgement at all, just to say things at the conceptual stage lack a certain polish.
UPDATE: I’ll just add that though I don’t pretend to know how this all works, many of the other conceptual renderings we’ve seen from Gehry’s studio for the Mirvish project do not seem to have the “wrapped in toilet paper” effect in evidence, such as these over here at No Mean City, and particularly this one which shows (I think) some of the streetscape.
