The author of the project was Frank Gehry: this is his first job in his hometown. The Gallery is distinguished from most of his other museum buildings by restraint, the absence of expressive "gestures", perhaps even a certain modesty.
The Gallery complex is a revised and enlarged ensemble of buildings of different times, formed throughout the 20th century. Gehry replaced some of the later parts with new buildings, giving clarity to the overall plan, and also significantly increasing the AGO exhibition space.
The main facade of the museum resembles the hull of a sailboat or the side of a huge fish: a rounded glass wall hides a wooden frame and planked walls of the sculpture hall “Gallery Italy”, which is open into the city's space. It is located on the second floor of the building, above the entrance, and its volume is flanked by two "panels" of glass and steel.
Above the gallery's rear façade, facing the park, a cube of contemporary art halls clad in blue titanium sheets dominates the museum's spiraling main staircase, partly projecting outward.
The main entrance of AGO opens into a small lobby, through which there is a winding ramp leading to the halls: you have to slow down on it, which creates the appropriate mood for visitors. The center of the museum complex is the Walker's Courtyard, built in the 1920s and meticulously renovated by Frank Gehry. Its only modern element is a staircase curled into a serpentine ribbon leading to the modern art department, created by the architect from scratch (Gehry left most of the other exhibition spaces intact). These are spacious rooms with windows overlooking the park; also many have glass floors. For the convenience of the curators, some of these rooms have been divided into smaller sections to suit any exhibition.
Critics have already noted the pleasant difference between the updated Gallery of Ontario and the Royal Ontario Museum, which underwent the same transformation last year: then Daniel Libeskind was responsible for the reconstruction, who created a dramatic "architecture for architecture", little related to its main function - the exhibition of works of art. The reason for this is that Libeskind is a stranger to Toronto, and Frank Gehry grew up in a house located a few blocks from the Gallery complex, and for him work on her project became a kind of journey into the past, which undoubtedly influenced the "atypical" for his work this discreet and poetic building.