Frank Gehry returns to the streets of his Canadian childhood

The renowned architect was back in Toronto for the start of construction work on his second project in the city ​​where he was born and raised.

Frank Gehry, the architect whose free-form Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, redefined architecture and sparked a wave of museum construction in the late 1990s, recently returned to Toronto, celebrating the start of a new project.

ImageFrank Gehry, the architect, at the site of his latest project in Toronto last month.Credit...Ian Austen/The New York Times

Born and raised in Toronto, Gehry has had only one work in Canada, his acclaimed renovation of the Art Gallery of Ontario, which opened in 2008 in the neighborhood where he grown.

At 94, he's notoriously indifferent to retirement, and he came to Toronto last month to witness what he intends to be another chef works in Canada: two condo towers that will be his tallest project to date. One tower will be 84 stories high; the other, 74.

The project, known as Forma, will be located near Roy Thomson Hall, the current home of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, in the streets that Mr. Gehry walked in his youth, when the neighborhood was dominated by train tracks and warehouses.

It all started with a collaboration between Mr. Gehry and David Mirvish, the theater owner Mr. Gehry knew from when Mr. Mirvish owned a private art gallery. The original plan, unveiled a decade ago, called for three towers of over 80 floors each, but was scaled back after backlash from the public and some politicians. The final design preserves, rather than knocking down, the Princess of Wales Theater and retains two of the four warehouses that would have been demolished in the foreground. Mr. Mirvish also sold the project to a consortium of developers.

After Mr. Gehry posed for many groundbreaking photos, I met in an office used by developers. Our conversation...