Before reading this, you need to know a thing or two about what fires the mind of architect Frank Gehry.

His love of hockey is already well known, so it wasn't surprising that Gehry immediately acknowledged the presence of Mats Sundin, Ken Dryden and Senator Frank Mahovolich at the Art Gallery of Ontario yesterday before speaking about his redesign and expansion of the AGO.

But hockey didn't teach Gehry how to radically upset the conventions of modern architecture. The bashed-up contemporary art forms of artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns did. Every year, he visits the pilgrimage chapel by the great Le Corbusier that sits on the top of a hill at Ronchamp, France. During one visit, he stood on the grassy plain that surrounds the chapel, looking at the boldness of the white sculpted building, and he started to cry.

He's been reading the works of Marcel Proust for about 15 years and listens to the stories on audio tape in his car while he drives from the gym to work in his car: "There are these inner thoughts that he had, that are so personal that you would never think to say them, but they're so strong and so liberating."

Strong and liberating is what Gehry's architecture has expressed to the world. To free us from the box is why cultural institutions in Germany and Spain, and many throughout the United States have hired Gehry to be their transforming architect. And it is surely the reason, 14 months ago, the AGO in Toronto announced Gehry had been appointed to redevelop its building in the city's downtown.

But the conviction and depth of artistry that Gehry has brought elsewhere to his remarkable building portfolio has been ground down at the AGO. How else to explain the 600-foot-long canopy that defines the new gallery façade on Dundas Street. It covers the existing façade like a skirt pulled down hard to hide any offending body parts. On paper, the mix of glass and titanium sounds appealing, especially for those who crave something reminiscent of the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum. But, shown in model, the titanium is hardly the mesmerizing quilt that Gehry produced for Bilbao -- a cladding that billows ever so slightly in the wind. It is rendered along the AGO's canopy as uninspired lengths that could cast the north entrance of the gallery into formidable amounts of shadow. The scale of the canopy is troubling, too: Unlike the signature designs of Gehry, which dish out complex forms like a celebration of democracy, this intervention is, sadly, oppressive. It better suits the unrelenting scale of a highway than a dense, urban neighbourhood.

Gehry has gone missing in other parts of the gallery redesign. His deft meshing of volumes is nowhere to be found in the big, hulking box that rises 140 feet -- about the equivalent of 10 storeys -- at the southern back of the gallery. Yes, there is an urban conversation that the new AGO height establishes with Will Alsop's refreshingly outrageous tabletop building of the Ontario College of Art and Design. But where is the careful resolution of the volume that flips off the skylight of the existing sculpture court?

Gehry himself says he's not satisfied with the way the box has turned out. The redevelopment of the gallery has been programmatically driven -- designed from the inside out. "How about budgetarily driven?" Gehry says in an interview following the unveiling. "We tried, but there wasn't the money to do it."

There's comfort in reading this not as a finished design but as a work-in-progress.

To be sure, the programmatics of the AGO have been nicely resolved -- the circulation flows from Dundas Street directly to Walker Court in a gesture that has long been overdue. A new, north-facing sculpture promenade has been imaginatively inserted into the length of the canopy affording views over Dundas Street and its Victorian neighbourhood. The tightly spiralling staircase that snakes its way through one of the arches toward the back of Walker Court and up to the third and fourth contemporary galleries is true to the genius of Gehry. It carries with it the thrill and danger of his most beloved moments in architecture -- besides, people need to rub against each other more often in a city as tightly wound as Toronto.

But then, there's something disconcertingly slapdash about the way the staircase is thrust against the big box. Bizarrely, it looks like a tentative first gesture -- not what follows one year of design development. How to explain this is surely a long and complicated story. Gehry has spoken of the difficulty of pleasing not one but two clients for the AGO: gallery director Matthew Teitelbaum and dedicated art collector Kenneth Thomson. The budget of $195-million is a firm number and he says he's been told to stick to it. "We're right on the edge of the budget right now and I've been told that I've got to be on budget. We're going to get the most out of it that we can." Could the art of the architecture be heightened at the AGO for, say, another $100-million? "Yes," he says, "Probably."

This is not to say that Gehry didn't try or that he has given up trying for the AGO. Look at the many iterations of the gallery and be amazed by the rich possibilities. In one earlier model, now on view along with hundreds of images and maquettes both large and small scale, the presence of Gehry is palpable. In it, there are forms that look like stove pipe next to other volumes expressed as pleated fans and Cubist volumes -- they're as bold as anything he produced for the seminal Chiat Day building in Venice, Calif. (1991). The point is Gehry was on to something strong and liberating during the design development of the project. Then came the rupture away from the sensuous, playful forms to something clearly buttoned-down and corporate. Give him some room. Trust the artist in the architect. Allow Gehry to trigger a cultural renaissance for Toronto.

Most of all, the AGO needs to do whatever it takes to allow Gehry to be brave for Toronto. Gehry learned his courage as a Jewish boy growing up in Toronto and Northern Ontario. There were the formative four years when he lived in Timmins from the age of 8 to 13. "I was getting beat up for killing Christ," he says, "and the courage I got there was from the French Canadian kids who came to my aid, so I have a very warm spot for them. They were getting beat up by the Anglo kids." He remembers seeing signs up in a lakeside community west of Toronto that no Jews were allowed in a restaurant. "That strengthens you -- it puts some fibre in your bones. It stiffens you to do things, to rise above it, to want to make a difference."

Now is the time for his hometown to let him do that.