The Globe and Mail

Always, before the unveiling of a project design, Frank Gehry feels a foreboding of public scorn. He agonized before the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao opened in 1997, and remembers how some berated his Disney Concert Hall, recently opened to critical acclaim, as broken crockery. Now, days before he is finally able to show his design for the redevelopment of the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, his artistic angst is creeping up on him. "It's hard to work in Canada. I heard today that people are saying, 'Why did anybody need a Frank Gehry building?' . . . I don't want to be where I'm not wanted." His homecoming in Toronto has included some pomp and ceremony -- and heartfelt cheering from the crowds -- but it hasn't been a carefree ride. Unlike any of Gehry's other projects, the Art Gallery of Ontario is a two-headed client: There's AGO director Matthew Teitelbaum and then there's the publishing magnate Kenneth Thomson, who has donated not only his massive collection of art but also $70-million in cash to a reinvented art gallery.