The AGO has plans for a major 40,000-square-foot expansion. Here’s what it will look like

The Art Gallery of Ontario has revealed plans for a major expansion that will add 40,000 square feet of space, increasing the exhibition area of one of North America’s largest art museums by 30 per cent.

The addition will be named the Dani Reiss Modern and Contemporary Gallery, after the Canada Goose chairman and CEO whose $35 million donation to launch the project is one of the largest gifts in AGO history.

Designed by Diamond Schmitt, Selldorf Architects and Two Row Architect, the extension will add at least 13 flexible, column-free exhibition spaces across five floors, which will perch one story above the AGO’s loading dock, between the Frank Gehry-designed museum building and the Ontario College of Art & Design University. It will be accessible from AGO’s current galleries at four locations.

Stephan Jost, the Michael and Sonja Koerner director and CEO of the AGO, said that over the past decade the museum has added more than 20,000 works to a contemporary and modern collection that now numbers 120,000.

As for Reiss’s contribution, Jost said, “Dani loves modern contemporary art, and he also loves Inuit art. He is from Toronto, his company is based here, and very simply he wanted to help our city be extraordinary.”

The goal for the architects, according to Diamond Schmitt, principal Donald Schmitt, was to design a building that was “simple, flexible, durable, and robust in a way that not only provides real flexibility for curators to show work currently, (but gives) them flexibility to … anticipate different kinds of art and exhibition protocols in the future.”

The challenge, Schmitt said, was the location. “Our site to build is literally on top of an outdoor courtyard, which is used for trucking and deliveries of art to the gallery,” he said. “So, we were floating this new building literally in the air and building it without disrupting loading and servicing. The challenge was understanding how to elevate this space, how to connect it to as many floors of the gallery as we can, to the elevators, and internally between large gallery spaces.”

Discussions with Indigenous leaders and communities, led by Indigenous firm Two Row Architect, helped shape the design and lead the partners in an environmentally friendly direction. The addition is being designed to operate without the need to burn fossil fuels and with zero carbon emissions.

“The AGO has done a great job over the last few decades showing the dialogue between Indigenous and mainstream voices, between historic and contemporary works, and this project was an opportunity to extend Indigenous values into the very architecture of the place,” said Brian Porter, principal at Two Row Architect. “We have some (design elements) where we are going to be reconnecting back to the city’s fabric, to the sun and to the sky.”

While the project is currently undergoing the municipal and public review process, Jost said he doesn’t anticipate any permit issues, “partly because 100 per cent of this project is a gallery space for the public. There are no commercial aspects to it.”

The Dani Reiss Modern and Contemporary Gallery is expected to require an estimated $100 million in construction development costs, which Jost said will come from various sources. “We have other gifts we will announce in the coming months,” he said. “There will most likely be some public money as well. But it will be a private-public partnership with the private philanthropist doing the majority of the lifting.”

The AGO hopes to start construction in 2024, anticipating completion in 2027.

“It is going to be a really extraordinary building,” Jost said. “It’s not small, but it’s quiet. It’s understated elegance. This is what we created.”

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