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If any doubt remains that the Toronto-born Frank Gehry is one of the world's great architects, his overhaul of the Art Gallery of Ontario, which opens today, should erase it. Mr. Gehry's AGO is a restrained masterpiece, and a reminder of the power of architecture to reinvent ideas, institutions and cities.

The proof of Mr. Gehry's genius lies in his deft adaptation to unusual circumstances. By his standards, it was to be done on the cheap, for a mere $276-million. The museum's administrators and neighbours were adamant that the architect, who is used to being handed whole city blocks for over-the-top titanium confections, produce a lower-key design, sensitive to its context and the gallery's long history.

Working mostly in glass and Douglas fir, Mr. Gehry has given us a thrilling series of spaces, from a 200-metre-long glassed-in sculpture gallery, suspended over a public street, to an elegant new centre for contemporary art high above a park at the rear of the AGO. The revamped museum is a fitting home for an excellent and growing collection, which now includes some 2,000 pieces donated by the late Kenneth Thomson.

The city of Toronto is nearing the end of an unprecedented round of cultural construction. Some of its results – Daniel Libeskind's renovation of the Royal Ontario Museum and Jack Diamond's Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts – opened to mixed reviews. A few, including a new film centre and a blockbuster museum of Islamic art bankrolled by the Aga Khan, are still to come.

None is likely to engage Toronto as meaningfully as Mr. Gehry, who grew up a few blocks from the AGO before leaving to make his career in Los Angeles. His creation embraces the city, exposing gallery-goers to new views of the jumbled, multi-layered aesthetic that defines so much of it. But its beauty also challenges Toronto, a place that has never been concerned enough with looks, to do better.

Canadians outside Toronto may be tempted to dismiss the new AGO as another gold-plated example of the city's ample self-regard. That would be a mistake. Its collection includes some of the best works of such quintessentially Canadian artists as Cornelius Krieghoff, Jean-Paul Riopelle and the Group of Seven, and Mr. Gehry's design recalls the country's enduring architectural and natural themes. It is a moving tribute to a city and a country, and to art, and deserves to be called one of Canada's cultural crown jewels.