Frank Gehry: A prodigal son looks to leave his mark in Toronto

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For architects, place matters deeply. And Frank Gehry, the world's most prominent architect, has his home base and crucible in Los Angeles. He's lived there since 1947; his work has been shaped by Southern California's cultural and physical surroundings.

But when I recently asked Mr. Gehry a question about Toronto, the place where he was born, he responded with an outpouring of thoughts and memories. "O Canada. My home and native land." The words came out with a sigh and just a hint of irony. Which makes sense: the architect has a deep affection for Toronto, where he was born and spent his childhood, but the city has not always loved him back. He has only completed one significant work here – the Art Gallery of Ontario renovation, completed in 2008.

There have been other plans. As an architect, he has worked on numerous proposals for the city, including a synagogue and a version of Metro Hall that would have located it at Harbourfront. And these matter to him personally. Though he moved away more than 60 years ago, Mr. Gehry thinks of himself as Canadian, and he clearly cares a lot about what Toronto thinks of him. Soon, his planned Mirvish Gehry project could let him make his mark on the skyline for the first time.

During our conversation recently in Paris, before the opening of his new Fondation Louis Vuitton gallery, Mr. Gehry kept returning to the subject of his home city and his reception here. One incident happened in 1981, when Mr. Gehry was invited to speak at U of T's architecture school, he recalled, and then the dean, Blanche Lemco van Ginkel, called to cancel, Mr. Gehry said. "They made some excuse," he said with a wave of his hand. Then another architect and academic, Larry Wayne Richards, called with the truth: "He said, 'The reason your lecture was cancelled is they don't like your work.'"

So Mr. Richards, then at the University of Waterloo, arranged for Mr. Gehry to speak in Toronto followed by an extended visit at Waterloo. Mr. Gehry, remembering this during our conversation, was still full of warm feeling about this – and a 1992 visit to Waterloo, when he played his beloved game, hockey, on a team including some NHL old-timers.

Mr. Gehry's emphasis on this old slight may be hard to understand today, but he is famously insecure about his work. And in the early 1980s, while the architecture world was riven by deep debate, Mr. Gehry was a divisive figure. "For a lot of people at that time, he was the asphalt guy, the chain-link architect," says Mr. Richards, who would go on become the highly influential dean of U of T's architecture school from 1997 to 2004. "His work was not appreciated by some people. And that meant a lot to him."

His formative years, which Mr. Gehry seems to remember as both happy and tumultuous, were in Toronto. Frank Owen Goldberg was born in Toronto Feb. 28, 1929, to parents Thelma Caplan and Irving Goldberg – both immigrants, from Poland and from New York respectively, working to find a place in Toronto. He and his sister Doreen grew up in a downtown Jewish community along Dundas Street West, surrounded by family. Mr. Gehry tells stories about buying a carp in Kensington Market each week with his grandmother Leah Caplan, who lived on Beverly Street, and watching the big fish flop in the bathtub before it was carved into gefilte fish. (Fish are a motif in his work even today.)

His modest childhood home was on Dundas "…near Rusholme," Mr. Gehry recalled with a grin. "1364 Dundas West. How did that come out of my head?"

But there was also uncertainty. Mr. Gehry's father was mercurial and temperamental; his succession of jobs and small businesses included various failures. One venture in slot machines took them to Timmins, Ont., where they lived for a short, unhappy period. Then came high school, which he attended at Bloor Collegiate. (He still has an old friend from those days.)

The family moved to Los Angeles in 1947 on a doctor's recommendation for Mr. Gehry's father, who had just had a heart attack (according to one version of the history, during an argument with Frank). There Mr. Gehry drove a truck, took a few college courses and then, following the suggestion of an artist who taught him in a ceramics class, tried architecture.

His work developed in a slow burn until the late 1970s. He developed a career doing straightforward work for developers while, in his spare time, exchanging ideas with some of the city's most innovative artists and developing his own language. He drew on the forms and materials of everyday Los Angeles buildings, making high architecture out of chain-link and wood framing. (A current museum show at the Pompidou includes his own photos of warehouses and factories.)

Along the way he periodically visited Toronto, and when his critical star ascended in the 1980s, he was nearly hired to work here. Globe and Mail architecture critic Adele Freedman and Mr. Richards were among his vocal advocates.

For the new Metro Hall development, Mr. Gehry teamed up with developers Olympia & York on a proposal that would have put the new centre at Harbourfront, near York Street and Queen's Quay. They lost the competition. Another proposal for an O&Y office tower in New York was scrapped by the 1989 recession. Only one thing came to fruition: an office interior for the advertising agency Chiat/Day, opened in 1989 and removed seven years later.

Such setbacks are not uncommon – every ambitious architect sees many projects go unbuilt. But Mr. Gehry remained eager to do major work in Toronto.

In 2000, Holy Blossom Temple was pursuing Mr. Gehry to design a renovation of the synagogue (which is today still being planned, with Diamond Schmitt Architects). It didn't happen. But a bigger job did: the Art Gallery of Ontario renovation, driven and largely funded by the Thomson family. Working with Ken Thomson and later his son David Thomson, Mr. Gehry designed and built a complex, many-layered project on a site close to his grandparents' house, for an institution that he visited as a child. (The Thomsons' Woodbridge Co. are majority owners of The Globe and Mail.)

His current work, a planned mixed-use complex on King Street West for David Mirvish, would mark a large-scale return to the city. The design of the project has changed significantly, and though it has been approved by city council, Mr. Gehry said the details – and perhaps more than that – are likely to evolve. This is typical; he famously works and reworks each project as long as possible. "We're just starting, really," he said, smiling. "We have the scheme, but we'll see."

The Mirvish Gehry complex "means a lot" to Mr. Gehry, he said. Partly it will be an attempt to reconcile the past and the present: he is unsentimental about the buildings of the city of his childhood - "I grew up in that area and I remember those warehouses," he says. And he argues that the way to capture Toronto's spirit is not half-baked preservation.

When he made controversial remarks that three Mirvish-owned 19th-century warehouses could be torn down, along with much of Toronto's other built heritage, he says, "I was really misunderstood. I wasn't saying it was trivial, I was saying it was almost impossible to save the strength of it."

In other words, he is (rightly) dismissive of "facadism." That is the preservation technique of retaining a facade while gutting the rest of the building and changing its use, turning the building into a stage set.

This is how he explained it to chief planner Jennifer Keesmaat: "I think there's a way to make a building that could relate to Osgoode Hall, could relate to Toronto's history, without mimicking it."

"I walked these streets. I know the feeling of the place."