Other people’s money builds a better building

The celebrity status of Frank Gehry was mentioned by Toronto Star columnist Christopher Hume as the prime example of how architects have become pop cultural fodder, in a column rounding up results from the Pugly Awards, where public buildings gained online voter approval ahead of the complexes that people are paying to live in. No such coverage in The Globe and Mail, where John Barber had swiftly dismissed the premise as condescending, with awful website photography to match, summing up the Pugly enterprise as “the project of a self-appointed elite – the heiresses and their decorators, swilling Chablis at the abominable Spoke Club”. And ultimately not tapping into any kind of public consciousness if the local architecture obsessives at the Urban Toronto Forum have nothing to say about the outcome. The pseudonymous blogger Classic Quarters sticks up for the thumbs-down loser Glen Lake condo in the Junction, though: “The faux balconies are plainly stupid; but I’ve seen similar prissy features tacked onto similar sized upper scaled condos along mid-town Yonge Street.” But will the Pugly Awards sustain its mediocre approach to highlighting mediocrity for long enough grade Gehry’s transformation of the Art Gallery of Ontario sometime after the summer of 2008? While reconstruction of the AGO is accuring funds – now 83 per cent of its way to $254 million goal while not charging admission – you can’t yet pay to see Sketches of Frank Gehry in a local cinema, even though the Sydney Pollack documentary on the Toronto-born designer premiered at TIFF, and has been playing for the past month in other cities. While the film is destined for a PBS airing later this year, reviews for Sketches on the big screen have been favourable, since it provides an opportunity to contemplate how the creative process can most effectively flourish when you find what Pollack calls “a sliver of space in the commercial world where you can make a difference”. Response to the portrayal on The Huffington Post wasn’t nearly as kind, with reviewer Eva Hagberg noting the “grandfatherly schlub schtick” overshadows examination of how those doodles become structural reality: “Instead, there are only slyly self-aware nods to the consistent difficulty of the profession, small critical moments where it seems almost plausible that Pollack might rip open the slickly schlumpfy image Gehry so comfortably projects.”