Gehry home in AGO area to be demolished

Somewhere forgotten in a landfill there is a bathtub that, for a few Thursday nights in the 1940s, contained the live carp that Lillian Caplan carried from Toronto’s Kensington Market to her home at 15 Beverley St., near the modern-day Queen Street West shopping strip.

Her grandson, the young Ephraim Goldberg who became the architect Frank Gehry, has described the shimmering scales of these eventual gefilte fish as an early inspiration for his famously fluid and rippling designs, notably his new Art Gallery of Ontario, one block to the north.

As a top celebrity “starchitect” in Los Angeles, Mr. Gehry, 81, made that vision literal in the huge “El Pez” sculpture of a fish he designed for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, and in the titanium scales of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, which a survey of influential architects in the current Vanity Fair ranked the most important piece of architecture since 1980.

So when a developer announced plans to build a condominium tower right over top of Samuel and Lillian Caplan’s architecturally undistinguished 1858 rowhouse, there was a scramble to preserve this history, including a poignantly written 2008 listing as a heritage building, which describes its “associative and contextual values.”

Now, after long negotiations, the developer and the city have agreed on a plan to destroy the Caplan house, and to recognize the Gehry aspect through a piece of public art. Plans are not finalized, but one proposal is a mobile of fish in the lobby fronting onto Queen Street West.

“The bathtub was the goal. We were looking for the bathtub. The bathtub was the holy grail,” said Toronto Councillor Adam Vaughan, who was involved in the negotiations. The idea was to coat it in titanium and put it out for display, just like the Guggenheim, but it was not to be, most likely discarded in one of several interior guttings of the house. “Somebody lost an amazing opportunity for public art,” Mr. Vaughan said.

He said an agreement is in place for what is expected to be a formal vote of approval at an Aug. 17 city council meeting. As part of the agreement, which saw the original condo design altered in response to community concerns about shade and sidewalk width, the developer is to replace the affordable rental housing that will be lost with a development nearby at the residence-starved Ontario College of Art and Design.

The 12 Degrees building is to be 10 storeys high, in glass and metal, with the upper floors shifted 12 degrees off-centre, to resemble an opening gate or a door.

“We’re people who care about heritage, believe it or not,” said Tyler Hershberg, a partner in BSaR Group of Companies. He objected to the description of the house as Frank Gehry’s childhood home, because his parents lived in a house further west, near Ossington and Dundas.

The City of Toronto historical listing (as opposed to the stricter “designation”) says that he “primarily resided” at 15 Beverley, and mentions that his bar mitzvah happened nearby.

“I’m not trying to downplay the significance in any way, but for people to think we’re losing Frank Gehry’s house is incorrect,” Mr. Hershberg said.

Mr. Gehry did not return a request for comment on Monday.