Can Frank Gehry Interest You in a Condo?
In Toronto, the greatest living architect is wading into one of the world’s biggest building booms at the worst possible time.
Camera shutters click and electro music thumps as 93-year-old Frank Gehry arrives at the stage. It’s time to sell some condos. After a nearly six-decade career that’s brought Gehry recognition as the world’s greatest, or at least most famous, architect, this is something new. For the past 10 years he’s been trying to get permission in Toronto, the city of his birth, to erect a pair of skyline-defining towers on King Street at Duncan, in the heart of the theater district downtown. One of the towers, at 84 stories, would be the tallest he’s ever built.
Now, with the regulatory route clear, the biggest hurdle to realizing his dream is selling some units. Banks in Canada won’t finance condominium projects unless at least 70% of the units have been presold. No presales, no late-career masterpiece. So here’s Gehry, on a whirlwind two-day visit to his hometown, trying to drum up enthusiasm.
First up is this “rah-rah sales event,” in the words of one of Gehry’s local partners. Some 700 real estate agents are packed into a ballroom at the Art Gallery of Ontario, whose graceful convex glass facade Gehry himself designed, to ecstatic reviews, for a renovation completed in 2008. There are open bars on either side, waiters circulating with hors d’oeuvres, and a roving saxophonist doing solos. Opening acts have hyped up the crowd with predictions of ever-rising condo prices; Toronto’s real estate boom has been going on so long that they’re a better investment than the stock market, according to one builder. It’s an odd time for such confidence, given that average home prices in the city have fallen almost 12% since February, the worst downturn it has seen in years, and one most economists say is far from over. Royal Bank of Canada predicts the country’s housing market is in the midst of an “historic correction” greater than any in at least 40 years, raising the possibility that Gehry and his partners are trying to sell residential real estate at one of the worst times ever to do it in Toronto.
Gehry needs help mounting the stairs and moves with a stooped shuffle once onstage. He’s wearing his customary navy-blue blazer and black pants, forsaking the usual plain-black T-shirt for a collared button-down in deference to the occasion. The real estate agents greet him with wild applause, cheers, and whistles. After Gehry slumps into his chair, an interviewer asks him for some reminiscences about his boyhood in Toronto. He somewhat listlessly obliges, recalling working at his grandfather’s hardware store on Queen Street, delivering telephone books in a little wagon on King Street, and sneaking into a long-disappeared strip club with his pals. But when the conversation turns to the towers, Gehry perks up, his voice suddenly sharp and clear.
“Let’s get to the action,” he says to cheers and claps.
As one of the people responsible for building Gehry’s Toronto towers, Mitchell Cohen seems a bit stressed. “I haven’t slept in two weeks,” he says. An avuncular man with thinning hair, tortoiseshell reading glasses, and the checked-blazer-and-jeans combo that seems standard issue in the real estate industry, Cohen is the chief operating officer of Westdale Properties, one of a trio of developers executing the project. He’s serving as Gehry’s chaperone and handler in Toronto, and he treats his guest like a beloved grandfather, at one point asking Gehry if he needs a schluff, the Yiddish word for nap. Otherwise, Cohen exhibits a nervous energy reminiscent of Jack Lemmon in the movie version of Glengarry Glen Ross. “Always be selling,” he tells a colleague at one point, a variation on the “Always be closing” line that film introduced to sales lingo everywhere.
Cohen downs two cups of coffee as we chat in the lobby of the Park Hyatt. He compares the Gehry project to being ensnared by three lassos—one held by municipal authorities, one by Gehry’s artistic vision, and the third by economic realities. Each lasso is pulling him in a different direction.
In 2012, Gehry and Mirvish proposed three towers, all of them over 80 stories and otherworldly looking, with each covered in its own elaborate copper, white, and gold-colored latticework, with ribbons of pearl swirling around their podiums. Aside from their obvious technical complexity, these designs blew past virtually all of the city’s planning rules for the area. The highest tower allowed in the theater district to that point had been 157 meters (515 feet) tall, well shy even of the shortest proposed tower’s 271. The more than 2,700 condo units Gehry and Mirvish would bring to King Street was more than double the density of residential units allowed in that part of town to date. And they wanted to demolish four historically designated brick warehouses in the process, as well as one of Mirvish’s theaters, itself a beloved local institution.
The city council rejected the plan, but the rapturous reception it had gotten in local media and the prospect of Toronto being home to a major Gehry work were enough to bring officials to the negotiating table. More than a year later came a compromise: Mirvish and Gehry could have their height but could build only two towers instead of three, and the theater and one of the warehouse facades would have to be preserved. So they went back to the drawing board and came up with a new design; the paired towers would now both be silver and gleaming, with facades that alternated between sections of metal that rippled like Gehry’s New York skyscraper and expanses of faceted glass set at angles to catch the light and sparkle like a giant urban waterfall throughout the day.
The zoning changes were approved in 2014, and Mirvish spent a few years navigating the rest of the permitting and regulatory process. In 2017, with much of that work done and the all-important presales fast approaching, Mirvish agreed to sell the project to Cohen’s Westdale and two other local developers, one named Great Gulf Group and the other Dream.
“I’m not a developer,” Mirvish says with a shrug when he stops by the Park Hyatt to say hi to Gehry, and I ask why he sold.
“I don’t want to spend the next seven years of my life watching and supervising construction.”
With development expertise came more changes, as Cohen and his partners determined that Mirvish’s plan would make units too pricey, risking a presale flop that would keep the project from being built. First up for scrutiny was the ripple design of the metal panels running down the towers’ facades. In New York, achieving that had required the concrete slabs of each floor to be custom produced with wavy edges for the stainless-steel skin to be mounted on. The lack of bespoke concrete production capacity in Toronto would’ve made the necessary customization prohibitively expensive at scale. The developers asked Gehry if he could achieve the effect of movement that he was going for with flat-edged concrete instead, which would restrict the depth of the facade to no more than 10 inches.
Gehry and his team in LA took up the challenge. Determining that light would be the best vehicle for dynamic effects at such a shallow depth, they began crinkling up different types of metallic paper to see what looked best. They hit on a stainless-steel cladding that could be manufactured to look like aluminum foil after it’s been balled up and smoothed out. Then they placed a prototype panel outside their office and trained a camera on it to observe how its crinkles and folds caught sunlight and reflected it throughout the day. The aim was for the pattern of reflections in the steel to complement the sparkling colors in the glass, creating a varied texture that Gehry hoped would recall the “humanity” of the stone and brick structures from the city of his youth.
Other tweaks followed, such as eliminating balconies, which both developers and architect agreed people rarely use, especially at supertall heights where the weather patterns can make them less comfortable. Then they lowered the height of each tower by eight stories, as the developers came to believe the added cost of building that high outweighed the potential income from the units. They also expanded the total surface area of each floor, allowing them to build more large units, which the developers determined would help with sales.
But the most dramatic change was borne of aesthetics rather than economics. In the Mirvish design, both towers were relatively uniform in their ascent, but when Gehry reworked them he broke each into four vertical sections, cantilevering and then twisting the pieces to set them at odd angles to each other, as though they were the irregular wooden blocks he’d played with as a child. These varied angles came partly from Gehry’s determination to consider how people inside the towers experienced them, in addition to those outside—the shifts are intended to avoid having the view from any condo be completely occupied by the unit in the tower opposite. The overall effect from the outside is movement, Gehry’s aesthetic goal from the start; towers practically dancing with each other as the materials in their reflective facades sparkle and shift.
So, while Cohen concedes that the economic-realities lasso has been doing a lot of the pulling lately, he maintains that the integrity of Gehry’s vision has been just as important, if only because the economics wouldn’t work without that, too. “What sets us apart from somebody else who is in the same market conditions is we have an iconic project,” Cohen says. “In no way would we bastardize Frank’s design.”
As Gehry emerges from a black SUV at the site of his future towers, he spies a construction crane across the street and stops in his tracks. I ask what he’s thinking. “Just trying to figure out why we’re f—ing up this site,” he replies.
Gehry’s main complaint with the products of Toronto’s condo boom isn’t necessarily the towers themselves—“some are good, and some aren’t”—it’s how pell-mell they seem. After spending so much time thinking about the interplay between his two towers, down to the views from inside and how they relate to the city from 75 years ago, he hates the idea of other buildings spoiling those relationships. But there is a housing shortage after all, and so he resigns himself to hoping for the best from the architects and developers who build after him. He gets on with his duties for the second and final day of his Toronto visit: promotional interviews with local media. Television crews are setting up at the sleek sales center that’s been created in one of the brick warehouses that will be torn down to make way for his first tower.
As the interviews get under way, Gehry diligently cycles through his talking points for each reporter. He notes that the reflective design builds on what he’s done for art galleries at the University of Minnesota and the French city of Arles, recites some Toronto memories, and repeats a joke about how he wanted to use light because “light is free.” After going through all this four times, he looks visibly tired and asks an aide when he can leave. Then he catches sight of me awaiting a promised last word. “This guy’s still here,” Gehry says.
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