Features

Perched on 9-storey pencil-thin stilts, the spectacular new building for the Ontario
College of Art and Design defies gravity. The designers, engineers and ironworkers tell us about it.

Click on the pictures above for photo galleries.

Building in the Sky is about the architecture and construction of Toronto’s radical new Sharp Centre for Design, conceived by the renowned British architect Will Alsop.

Ten years ago there were 1000 students at OCAD, the Ontario College of Art and Design. This year there are 3000. The college is bursting. A $40 million dollar expansion project is underway. The centrepiece of the project is the Sharp Centre for Design.

The steel-framed building, all four million pounds of it, seems to float in the air, nine storeys up. Barely in contact with the ground, it’s supported on 12 slanting legs, angled upward like gigantic toothpicks. People walking by look up and gasp.

The new building is in a complex neighbourhood. There are some 2000 homes, from historic Victorian row houses to new condos and apartments, together with restaurants and small businesses. Around the corner is the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the edge of Chinatown. Immediately behind OCAD is Grange Park. A block to the south is trendy Queen Street.

Aware that their neighbours had a passionate stake in the new building, OCAD and architect Will Alsop consulted them during the design process. “Don’t block our view of the park,” said people across the street. And so the building starts above their sightlines, and incidentally allows the park itself to expand forward to the edge of the street.

Most public talk (and most pictures) about architecture imply that buildings spring full-blown from the head of the architect—which is not true at all. This IDEAS program by Max Allen is about the process of building as well as the product.

MORE ABOUT

* All photographs appearing on this site are by Max Allen.