With his one-time Toronto home to be demolished, Frank Gehry calls incoming condos “awful,” with “shitty-looking” lobby

The childhood home of legendary architect Frank Gehry, located near the AGO on Beverley Street, is apparently slated for demolition to make way for a condo development. While Toronto does stand to lose a piece of history (as well as a rather drab-looking row house), the irony is so palpable it almost makes up for it. The condo slated to oust Gehry’s one-time home is a weird, experimental, crystalline structure. “I hope they don’t put a plaque in the lobby that says I lived there,” the architect told the Globe. “I would be insulted by that. Who wants a plaque with your name on it in some shitty-looking lobby?”

Ouch. He also thinks the condo design looks “awful.”

With the plaque off the table, plans are in the works to pay homage to Gehry some other way, through some kind of public art. City councillor Adam Vaughan wants to put up a titanium-coated bathtub in commemoration of the Kensington Market bathtub, circa 1940s, that contained the live fish Gehry’s grandmother used to carry home.

That sounds suitably avant-garde, but we suggest something more inspirational: a giant crumpled paper ball, perhaps?

• Gehry home in AGO area to be demolished [National Post]
• Frank Gehry unfazed by plans to demolish childhood home in Toronto [Globe and Mail]