Designed by architect Frank Gehry, the Art Gallery of Ontario's Walker Court features a spiral staircase. (Nathan Denette/Canadian Press)

It goes without saying that the streets of any given city will change over time. Still, the fact that the corner of Dundas and McCaul in Toronto is now a completely different animal than it was four years ago is remarkable.

The intersection has always been defined by the two institutions that share it: the Ontario College of Art and Design on McCaul and the Art Gallery of Ontario on Dundas. British architect Will Alsop radically redesigned OCAD in 2004, adding a giant hovering box on coloured stilts (the Sharp Centre for Design). Now, after years of hoopla and construction, we have Frank Gehry’s renovation and facelift of the AGO.

To the general public, Frank Gehry's buildings are a magic trick of construction. Whether private residences or institutional edifices, his buildings have become tourist destinations.

The world’s institutional developers are mad for Frank Gehry. Over the course of roughly two decades, the Toronto-born Gehry (né Goldberg) has established himself as an iconic presence. He is thought of as a Deconstructivist — his work abandons the holy modernist tenet that the outward appearance of a building should represent its purpose and functionality. This is not to say that Gehry’s buildings are flimsy or functionless. If anything, he pays very close attention to the practical needs of his clients. For example, he has a sterling reputation for bringing his projects to fruition within budget — no mean feat for a building like L.A.’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, which looks like a mob of heaving sails.

For the people who engage him, a Gehry building represents not only a fusion of utility and artistry, but an instant public profile. To the general public, his buildings are an astounding spectacle, a magic trick of construction. Whether private residences or institutional edifices, his buildings are tourist destinations. His more austere edifices — the office tower in Hanover, or the apartment buildings in Duesseldorf harbour — look like buildings doing the twist. His dancing house in Prague features undulating rows of windows, bulbous corner tower and a glass façade on one side that looks like a cinched corset.

His most iconic work is the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao. Situated in a once-derelict riverfront industrial lot, the museum has not only made the neighbourhood a vital public space, but it has revitalized the city, cemented the Guggenheim foundation as a cutting-edge global arts institution and launched Gehry into the stratosphere of public architects.

The museum is itself a kind of public sculpture — a mass of undulating, titanium-clad planes that reflect both the Mediterranean light and the water directly beneath the museum. The façade is astounding, and I have no idea how on earth they managed to fit three floors of gallery space in that thing, what with its stacks of crescent structures and fish-shaped roofs.

The miracle of it all is that Gehry did, with a great deal of care and deliberation. The galleries are brilliantly thought out, intended to interact with the art itself; the rooms that house the older works of the permanent collection are traditional and staid, exemplary white cubes. The contemporary galleries are more daring: leaf-shaped things that attempt to reflect the experimentalism of the work they showcase. Gehry built recessed skylights into all of the galleries, angled in such a way as to treat the sun as a diffuse spotlight, so that curators could make the most of both natural and artificial lighting.

The Gehry-designed Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, is constructed of titanium, limestone and glass. (Santiago Lyon, Associated Press)

The new AGO is not Bilbao. For one thing, Gehry’s redesign was tethered to the existing framework of the old building, curtailing his flights of sculptural fancy. While it’s not his most iconic work to date, it is, for my money, exemplary of the man’s singular talents.

The AGO’s main entryway is now vast and open. A massive serpentine ramp (curlicues are a major design motif) leads you to the lower galleries, now devoted exclusively to medieval to 19^th century artwork. Gehry has opened up the northern galleries in a nigh-miraculous manner, raising the ceiling and importing his recessed skylights from Bilbao. The rooms, and thus the artwork, seem to have been revived — now, they’re able to stretch out and breathe.

The once-stuffy Walker Court, the two-storey central cavity of the AGO, has been made bright and accessible. A walkway rings the upper level, culminating in a tight spiral staircase, leading up through and above the roof into the brand new fourth and fifth floor contemporary art galleries. The view from these floors is breathtaking. To the north, Toronto sprawls before you; to the south, you wave hello to Will Alsop’s hovering box and University Avenue down to the lakeshore.

These views are not merely dramatic — they anchor the museum to the city. The old AGO was a kind of enclave; you entered and left Toronto behind. These new views reinforce the AGO’s presence in Toronto, making a powerful statement about the co-dependence of a cosmopolitan centre and its cultural institutions.

Gehry talks about his new design of the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto on Nov. 13. (Mark Blinch/Reuters)

One of the main criticisms of Gehry is that his buildings are all bombast, spectacles that eclipse their function. Not so here. Because he had to work around the concrete realities of the old AGO, the spectacular flourishes are part and parcel of the building, adding joie de vivre to what was otherwise a very austere concrete block. The rolling glass panels of the façade completely open up that length of Dundas, giving the street a kind of majestic sweep. The shape also subtly evokes the trundling of the streetcars beneath.

The new AGO isn’t perfect. The contemporary galleries seem overly congested: mini-rooms are nestled in the larger galleries, confusing the floor plan and stifling the works showcased therein. The southern galleries on the first and second floors seem mostly untouched, dim and cramped compared with the expanded brightness of their northern neighbours. Still, in the context of a city in development frenzy, with institutions desperate for big name associations (with sometimes disastrous consequences — I’m looking at you, Royal Ontario Museum), Frank Gehry has delivered something genuinely praiseworthy: an exciting new building.

It’s not only worthy of all the hoopla, but solid and subtle enough to still be standing as an object of fascination and affection when it’s no longer the New AGO, and just simply the AGO.

Sholem Krishtalka is a writer based in Toronto.