A wooden staircase in the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, designed by architect Frank Gehry, in November, 2008.NATHAN DENETTE/The Canadian Press

Frank Gehry died this month at the age of 96. Let’s hope the era of the “starchitect” dies with him.

The term was coined to describe the superstar architects whose work everyone simply had to have. Mr. Gehry was the prime example. His Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain drew millions of tourists to see its sweeping, swirling form when it opened in 1997. The Toronto-born Mr. Gehry became perhaps the world’s most sought-after architect.

But not all of his creations were such a success. Consider his renovation of Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario. Mr. Gehry slapped a huge visor of wood and glass on its façade. Dramatic, no doubt, when he showed a model to the benefactors, who would have looked down on it from above.

The trouble is that no one in real life ever sees it that way. The AGO sits on a narrow downtown street: Dundas. When you pass it by car,........

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