With the recent installation of limestone floors and Douglas fir walls, the Art Gallery of Ontario {AGO} is wrapping up a top-to-bottom, four-year redesign by Frank Gehry, who spent much of his childhood just streets away from the Toronto museum. It also marks yet another instance of the city using attention-grabbing architecture to lure visitors to its cultural institutions.
The Art Gallery of Ontario
Photo of architectural model courtesy AGO

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The $217 million project—Gehry’s first major commission in Canada—increases the museum’s size nearly 20 percent, from 486,000 to 583,000 square feet. This added space will allow the institution to display twice as many pieces from its collection, which features artwork from 100 A.D. to the present, with an emphasis on Canadian artists. The museum also boasts the world’s largest collection of works by the British sculptor Henry Moore.

The AGO is North America’s tenth largest museum. Founded in 1900, it first was housed in the Grange, a Georgian mansion built in 1817. Over the decades, the museum has undergone six expansions—the Gehry project being the seventh–giving rise to a sprawling complex with an eclectic aesthetic. For the front elevation, Gehry has designed a new façade, a 600-foot-wide sweep of ribbed glass, which replaces a redbrick version from a 1993 renovation by Barton Myers and Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blumberg Architects {KPMB}. 
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