Toronto Star

Here in the city that architecture made famous, the power of design can be seen at every turn. Bilbao, a small city of 335,000 (a million if you include the suburbs) on Spain's Atlantic coast, was virtually unknown outside of the Basque region until a decade or so ago. That's when it launched an extraordinarily ambitious rebuilding program and transformed itself from an aging steel-town rust bucket into a global tourist destination. This is, of course, exactly the sort of thing Toronto hopes to accomplish through a handful of cultural building projects now underway. This so-called "renaissance" will be fine as far as it goes, but it's hard not to wander the streets of Bilbao without being struck by how much more we could have done here in Toronto. For Toronto, the wannabe capital of Canada, the lesson is painfully obvious: be bold or stay cold. The parallels are striking. Bilbao has a beautifully redeveloped waterfront, albeit one that runs along a river instead of one of the largest lakes in the world; it has a museum designed by acclaimed Toronto-born architect Frank Gehry, which happens to be the most celebrated building of the late 20th century. We, too, will soon have a Gehry — if not on the waterfront — but in our case it will consist of an internal reorganization of the existing Art Gallery of Ontario and a new façade.