Art Gallery of Ontario - Gehry Comes Home

Photo: Jeff Hitchcock from Seattle, WA, USA, CC BY 2.0 (cropped)

A stop on Toronto Downtown Walk, a free self-guided tour.

That long, rippling wall of glass and wood is Frank Gehry's Galleria Italia, about 200 metres of it stretched along Dundas Street. Gehry was born in Toronto in 1929 and grew up here before moving to California, so the Transformation AGO project, completed in 2008, was a homecoming for the architect best known for the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.

The gallery was founded in 1900, and its oldest part is The Grange, a brick manor built in 1817 by the Boulton family, one of the powerful clans of early York. Harriet Boulton Smith later left the house to the gallery, and you can see it from Grange Park behind the building.

Above the glass wall rises a block clad in titanium panels, with a sculptural spiral staircase poking out of it. Inside are more than 120,000 works, including the largest public collection of Henry Moore anywhere, plus major Canadian and Indigenous collections. Visitors 25 and under get in free; check the website for hours and prices.

Getting here: Walk west along Queen Street to McCaul Street, then turn right and walk north to Dundas Street West; the gallery fills the block on your left.

Did you know?: Henry Moore gave the gallery 300 of his works in 1974, the start of what is now the largest public collection of his art anywhere.

Photo op: Cross to the north side of Dundas Street and step back to catch the full sweep of the glass facade, with the titanium-clad gallery block rising behind it.

More on Wikipedia: Art Gallery of Ontario · Frank Gehry · The Grange · Henry Moore

Art Gallery of Ontario - Gehry Comes Home

Stops on this tour