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With stunning architectural features like the Walker Court's spiral staircase, the new Vivian and David Campbell Centre for Contemporary Art and the 600-foot-long Galleria Italia sculpture promenade, Frank Gehry's re-imagination of the Art Gallery of Ontario opened to the public Nov. 14.

It's a building of light and wood that integrates ground-breaking ideas about the many ways art and people connect. The expansion enlarged the AGO by 190,00 square feet of renovated space and 97,000 square feet of newly built space. The total project cost was $427 million. In total the AGO is home to more than 4,000 works in its 110 galleries.

Nearly 40 per cent of the artwork on display is new to the gallery, chief among them are the works given to the AGO by the late Ken Thompson and his wife Marilyn. In 2002 Mr. Thompson agreed to donate his art collection to the AGO. He had been collecting since the early 1950s.

The collection, comprising nearly 2,000 works, is among the most significant private collections in the world. The Thompson Collection as a whole occupies 30 of the 110 galleries at the AGO. The collection includes a unique collection of Canadian paintings, European small scale sculptures, ship molds and masterworks like Peter Paul Rubens's The Massacre of the Innocents.

The Thompson family also contributed a total of $100 million to the renovation.

World-renowned architect Frank Gehry was joined by Matthew Teitelbaum, director and CEO of the AGO, BMO vice-president Gilles Baillie and Charlie Baillie, president of the board of trustees, at the media preview on Nov. 13.

"(Thompson) could describe every one of those works of art as though he was holding them in his hand and they meant a lot to him," Gehry said. "And we tried to display them in a way that represents how he felt about them."

According to Teitelbaum, Gehry and his team understood what it meant to look at a piece of art.

"As we are standing in what we believe is a great building that it is not really about the building, and I say that with all humility on the same stage as Frank Gehry," Teitelbaum said. "It's about the experience."

Gehry grew up in Toronto, as did Thompson, and this is the museum of his childhood, Teitelbaum continued.

"I think that notion of childhood memory and that notion of how you have experienced spaces can make those spaces magical," he said. "We want this to be a building for everybody."

The AGO offers free admission on Wednesdays from 6 to 8:30 p.m. and free general admission is offered to Ontario secondary students ages 13 to 17 Tuesdays through Fridays from 3 to 5:30 p.m.

Over the course of the Nov. 14 weekend, long lines of people waited to enter the new gallery, free of charge.

The AGO has a permanent collection of more than 73,000 works of art spanning more than 1,000 years.