I can't wait until they reveal the plans for AGS.
Gallery honours Mendel
Initial plan for city's new gallery to go before council
By David Hutton, The StarPhoenix April 23, 2010
The $58-million Art Gallery of Saskatchewan will prominently display Fred Mendel's original art donation in a large, stand-alone gallery and tell his life story in an adjoining foyer that will exhibit the murals once painted on the walls of the meat-packing magnate's office.
The gallery's functional plan, which will be presented to city council on Monday, sets out how the building will be configured and what will be housed inside it.
Included in the plan is an outdoor public plaza that would replace the roundabout on Second Avenue.
The preliminary plan will be used as a template by the selected architectural firm, which will be chosen this summer from a short list of five candidates, to guide the development.
The legacy of Mendel, the art patron and meatpacking plant owner who founded the Mendel Art Gallery in 1964 and died in 1976, has become the centre of debate in the community after the decision was announced last year not to name the new gallery after him or further pursue less costly renovations at the present gallery site.
Art Gallery of Saskatchewan officials have maintained since the announcement that Mendel will be honoured in the new building.
The functional plan shows an 1,800-square-foot gallery located on the main floor where Mendel's art donations, housed for years in storage, will be permanently displayed, and a 250-square-foot foyer that will display murals painted by famous Saskatoon painter William Perehudoff.
The murals, commissioned by Mendel when Perehudoff was a worker at the meat plant, were saved before the Mitchell's Gourmet Foods plant was torn down.
"It just hope that the room shows the murals in the same format as they were in the Mitchell's plant," said Dave Denny, a local entrepreneur who helped save the works from the wrecking ball.
"If you break them up it's kind've like breaking up a Picasso."
The main challenge was aligning the three different uses of the site for River Landing, the Remai Arts Centre and the new art gallery, said Michael Lundholm, the Toronto-based architect in charge of the functional plan.
The new gallery will include a large atrium inside the Second Avenue entrance, an upscale bakery and cafe, a community art studio, a gallery shop and a lecture theatre. The exhibition space will more than double what exists at the Mendel Art Gallery.
"It's got all the right ingredients," Lundholm said. "It certainly has a strong public presence and a strong number of spaces that should involve a lot of people and a lot of different audiences than just the Mendel sitting alone.
"Our research showed us that the trend was to emphasize public functions to break down the boundary between the public and the art gallery."
The overall exhibition space will grow to more than 17,000 square feet from 7,000 in the current Mendel gallery. The total gallery is now estimated to be 62,000 square feet and attaches in an L-shape around the Remai Arts Centre.
What the building will look like and its exact layout will be left to the chosen architect. The city whittled a list of 15 firms down to five and will interview shortlisted candidates in May. The design of the recently completed Art Gallery of Alberta and the Royal Ontario Musuem have been left to competitions that include public input in the selection.
"Design competitions tend to run up budgets because they favour risky architecture," Lundholm said.
Instead, the city plans to ask for public feedback on some preliminary designs provided early on by the winning firm, he said.
One of the suggestions of the functional plan is to convert the roundabout at the entrance of the gallery that connects Second Avenue and Spadina Crescent into a public plaza to give the gallery entrance more space. Second Avenue will have to be realigned to accommodate the loss of the roundabout.
The roundabout features Prairie Wind, the public art installation featuring 25 tall steel poles that move in the wind, which is better suited for pedestrian traffic than vehicles, Lundholm said.
Lundholm said planners initially suggested extending the entrance of the gallery out to the middle of the roundabout to give it more prominence but city officials and politicians were concerned about blocking the view of the river and maintaining access to Second Avenue.
"The feeling was pretty clear and pretty universal that the river view be left," he said.
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COST BREAKDOWN:
Art gallery construction: $40.7 million
Site development: $800,000
Design fees: $6.3 million
Fit up costs: $1.8 million
Parking garage: $5M
Contingency: $3.4M
Funding:
Federal government: $13M
Provincial government: $17.1M
City of Saskatoon: $12.9M
Fundraising: $8M
Parking garage: $7M
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