It appears Frank Gehry’s 76-story Spruce Street tower in Lower Manhattan is just his opening act for large-scale urban projects. Canadian real-estate mogul and arts enthusiast David Mirvish has tapped Los Angeles-based and Toronto-born Gehry to design three distinctive 80-story condo towers in Toronto’s entertainment district. Gehry and Mirvish unveiled the design for the stacked towers, which will overhaul an entire city block from King Street west to Pearl Street replacing the renowned Princess of Wales Theatre, at a press conference Monday morning.

Two of the three towers rise from a six-story, stepped podium housing a new 60,000-square-foot museum to accommodate Mirvish’s extensive abstract art collection and space for the OCAD University Public Learning Centre for Visual Art, Curatorial Studies and Art History including galleries, studios, a lecture hall, and seminar rooms. A schematic model shows his signature abstract cladding style forming ribbons across the façade.

Gehry described the podium and its landscaped rooftop terraces as blending the height of the towers with the city’s human scale. “We hope to deliver a street scale that is evocative of old Toronto,” he said at the press conference. “With this project, I wanted to create buildings that were good neighbors to the surrounding buildings and that respected the rich and diverse history of the area. I also wanted to make nice places for the people who live in and visit the buildings.”

Mirvish hopes the project will provide an antidote for the banality of the traditional glass box condo tower. “I am not building condominiums,” he said at the announcement. “I am building three sculptures for people to live in.”

Plans to demolish the two-decade-old Princess of Whales Theater, built by Mirvish’s father, Ed, have drawn criticism from the Toronto arts scene. The theater has become something of an icon for Toronto theatergoers.

Peter Kofman, project manager at Projectcore, who is charged with “translating” Gehry’s creative design into concrete and steel, said that Mirvish believes the complex is the “natural progression of the entertainment district and the next step in the growth of Toronto,” noting that Mirvish’s family owns the theatre and many of the neighboring properties. “We will have much more success” in creating an elevated shape for the arts and entertainment district if “we can utilize the full block,” said Kofman when asked about the need to tear down the theater.

Plans for the towers must go through a community input process before they are approved, but Mirvish estimated that the phased project could be done in three to seven years.