PT Barnum was right

Words of wisdom from Toronto.

The Toronto Globe and Mail tells us that Mayor David Miller issued a challenge last night to builders and architects to put Toronto on the map for architectural and design excellence. "As a city we must learn to despise mediocrity," he said in a speech prepared for the city's architecture and urban design awards held at the Art Gallery of Ontario. " 'Good enough' is no longer good enough," he said. (...) In an interview before his speech, Mr. Miller said he wants architecture "to become a real value of Toronto."

City of Toronto, Architecture and Urban Design Awards

 

The project includes a striking new addition - a two-storey "flying rectangle" raised 26 metres above the existing building and street level.

The raising of the building above the ground allowed for the creation of a new outdoor public space (Butterfield Park) to the south of the existing building, provides pedestrian access between McCaul Street and the Grange Park to the west and preserves the views for the condominium residents on the east side of McCaul Street.

Jurors' Comments

Will Alsop's academic building is an altogether original and welcome enrichment of Toronto's urban fabric: artistically bold and imaginative, and respectful of residents and users in its culturally intense neighbourhood. Held high over the mixed Victorian and modern streetscape by colourful legs plunging earthward like thunderbolts, this addition to the Ontario College of Art and Design is cocky and attractively humorous, an element in the urban scene that holds its own with tough urbanity while allowing new public space to open up beneath it.

I just wish I had such an ability to fantasize with a straight face.

•••

As to John Massengale's question: Is it built?

The client's -- Ontario College of Art & Design -- own web page says that " the Sharp Centre for Design was completed in 2004."

The architect's page -- Alsop Architects -- is so poorly designed and so difficult to navigate that I couldn't find any reference to the building though it well might be there.

I checked Google images "Sharp Centre for Design" and alas the structure indeed appears to be real.

Here's yet more information from the client's pages: Sharp Centre for Design.

Comments

[john massengale]

Does anyone have a photo of what it's like to BE in that space?

[john massengale]

More questions: How come we always see the same computer rendering? Has this building been built? Anyone have an actual photo?

[Bill Seitz]

Hopefully Jane Jacobs can hold back some of this tide...

[Lee Horrocks]

It definitly does exist.

And that isn't a computer rendering - that's the actual building, as it actually looks. I have this personal theory that buildings like this look like computer rederings because they are designed on computers & then built the way the look in the computer.

In defence of David Miller - the OCAD building, although weird & somewhat ugly (and I wonder how it's going to hold up long term in the weather), is at least better than the vast number of mediocre looking condo buildings that have been build in Toronto in recent years. I think that was generally his point...

[David Sucher]

Lee.
Have you been there? What is it like undrneath it? How is the space configured? (The photo I saw shows a construction fence.)

[Chris Burd]

It is on the Alsop website. Once you've got past the initial page, click "Learning" on the left-hand menu, then "Ocad", and you're there. There's a cool picture of the elevated box as a structural skeleton.

My position on this sort of building is that every city is allowed *one*. I have to admit I like it better than the very mediocre Gehry and Liebeskind designs for the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Royal Ontario Museum (was the Gehry project canned?). As an expression of OCAD's snotty art school aesthetic, I guess it sort of works. The problem will be the emulators.

[Brian Miller]

"The problem will be the emulators."

Sadly, that's always the rub with modernists and decons and whatever is the latest flavor. For every Seagrams Building, you get a 1972 Fort Wayne National Bank Building (blah!)

[Chris Burd]

No, you get ten thousand 1972 Fort Wayne National Bank Buildings. But at least they're bland and banal. The OCAD emulators will produce actively ugly and obtrusive buildings.