TORONTO (digital Journal Features) – For more than half a century, the Ontario College of Art & Design (OCAD) has existed in a rather shabby zone of downtown Toronto. What’s more, it has been deprived of resources for renovations over the last 20 years. Across the street, the cluttered Village by the Grange condos have increasingly eclipsed the brown-bricked box on McCaul Street, like ivy grown wild on an old, forgotten building. Despite standing next to the Art Gallery of Ontario, OCAD has largely gone unnoticed outside the art education community.
But in late 2000, things changed for OCAD when award-winning British architect William Alsop received his first North American commission — the expansion and renovation of Canada’s largest design institution. The Toronto-based project is currently underway and scheduled for completion by fall 2004. Boasting an impressive international portfolio and eight years of experience teaching sculpture in London, the 55-year-old architect understands what it takes to teach and learn in a creative space.
“We needed a building that was going to make a statement,” says Peter Caldwell, vice-president of administration at OCAD. “I really felt that if OCAD wanted to make a mark, if we wanted to say we’re a creative institution, then this was the architect and design that was going to make that happen. The college has been in this boring building for decades and we haven’t been as high-profiled in the arts and design scene as we should be, so the whole point is stepping out of our shell.”
The college hasn’t only been suffering from a decaying façade and a low profile. The aging structure has failed to meet its users’ needs for the last decade, as the demand for instructional studios and classrooms consumed workspace once dedicated to student study time and breaks. Consequently, informal “gathering spaces” became faculty offices and common areas became career-counselling rooms, pushing campus life out the door. In 1997, a provincial report published by the Council of Ontario Universities (of which OCAD is a member) reported that the college had only 37 per cent of the space required for 2,000 full-time students, compared to a system average of 68 per cent. With little room for students and faculty to do their work on campus, let alone meet and interact, the sense of community OCAD was known for had begun to erode.
The college faced even more challenges this academic year with the double cohort of first-year students, the result of the Ontario government’s decision to axe Grade 13, which produced an influx of graduates from both Grade 12 and Grade 13. While OCAD was able to absorb the double cohort this year (most of the first-year classes take place in classrooms in the newly renovated Foundation Studies building across the street), the college’s entire expansion has to be completed by the fall of 2004. This is because they’ll need to accommodate the double cohort who will then be taking more lab-intensive courses in the main building during their second year.
But in the fall of 2000, when governments were seemingly more focused on education in computer science and information technology, OCAD’s bleak future had brightened. That year, the Ontario government awarded the school a $24-million Superbuild grant towards its $41-million expansion and renovation plans, which until then had only existed in the imaginations of the students and faculty — and ultimately deep in the creative conscience of world-renowned architect Alsop. When Alsop arrived en scene with his reputation for excessive designs and for injecting robust colour into drab urban settings, OCAD and its neighbours found the answer to their problems.
“I spent some time talking to people who live in the area and I listened to those people’s concerns. They’re the guys who are going to wake up and look out the window each day,” says Alsop, revealing a slight undertone of dry, British humour. “I like working with people because they can often inspire me beyond what I know and that’s the whole point. Part of the (architecture) process is talking to people and trying to solicit their ideas … people can take ownership of the project as a whole alongside me — and together, I think we can achieve a lot.”
Expert consultants from Toronto’s Sterling Finlayson Architects joined the team to direct the lengthy urban planning process of acquiring permits and zoning approvals. Caldwell and 16 steering committee members made up of key college administrators and board members then solicited some of the world’s top architects. Instead of holding a typical design competition where architecture firms submit a plan with models and drawings, the college released an R.Q. — Request for Qualifications — on the Internet, asking architects to apply strictly online and to detail their credentials and ideas about the project. Submissions from 35 companies from across Canada, the U.S., England, the Netherlands and Germany flooded the committee’s inbox. After a few weeks, the shortlist was narrowed down to six firms, five of them Canadian. The eventual winner was a joint venture between Alsop and Toronto’s Robbie/Young + Wright Architects.
When Gregory Woods of Toronto’s Robbie/Young + Wright Architects learned about this opportunity, he called a former classmate from London’s Bartlett School of Architecture and Planning who now works with Alsop. Thinking of Alsop’s background in art education, Woods spearheaded the collaboration, wanting to contribute an exciting piece of architecture to the city.
The Toronto native explains that joint-venturing in architecture is very common today, providing opportunities for international architects, with their varying schools of thought, to practice in different countries. “It can require a lot of energy and resources to set up shop in another country; it’s much easier to partner with a local architect and take on work in a joint-venture relationship,” Woods says.
Alsop and his team of 120 operate out of offices in London, Hamburg, Moscow, Rotterdam and now Toronto. Known for designing avant-garde buildings, Alsop has always been considered a maverick in the British architecture scene. His extraordinary visual vocabulary has transformed boring buildings into stunning structures, such as the Regional Government Headquarters in Marseilles and the Peckham Library and Media Centre in London, which won Britain’s Stirling Prize for Architecture in 2000. Moreover, the ultramarine of London’s North Greenwich subway station and the bright orange “beret” on stilts at the Peckham Library have made these once drab locations into distinct urban landmarks.
Woods adds that the selection process worked well because it encouraged everyone to dream and tease out the solution rather than parachute into a location with a grand design plan. “I think what intrigued Will (Alsop) most is they were looking for an architect and not for a solution. There was an assurance of an open-minded approach,” Woods says. “And (Alsop’s) whole approach is about process and asking questions, and that really struck a chord with the college … it had to set a new standard, challenging people with aesthetic. Someone like Alsop will do that — he’ll challenge you with design.”
Maintaining his bold approach, Alsop designed a two-storey tabletop structure connected to (but lifted high above) OCAD’s existing building, supported on a series of slender columns. Dubbed the “flying rectangle,” the outlandish structure will be sheathed in corrugated aluminium. Typical of Alsop’s playful yet complex vision, a pixilated pattern will camouflage the windows and blur the scale of the tabletop, making it impossible to tell where one floor begins or ends. Hoisted 26 metres in the air on eight-storey-high stilts of steel, 2.4 metres in diameter and buried 19 metres into the ground, the main attraction is part of more than 27,000 square metres of additional space that will increase OCAD’s campus size by 40 per cent.
“I wanted to bring the (Grange) park through to McCaul Street. By raising the addition to that height, it becomes an extraordinary space of cathedral proportions,” says Alsop, explaining that extending the building on the ground would have created a canon effect, further isolating the college from the open landscape of the park and from a wider range of accessibility.
Instead, Alsop took a step back and addressed OCAD’s approach to teaching as well as campus needs. “Instead of just building in the parking lot (south of the college), Alsop came up with a very creative solution to our problem,” says Lenore Richards, dean of OCAD’s faculty of design. Richards insists that OCAD stresses “visual arts,” not just window dressing. “We’re about looking at innovation. We teach our students to think creatively in terms of defining the problem and developing a solution. Our work addresses the human issues in developing spaces, objects or images that actually enhance people’s lives,” she says. “Our students have to learn to develop their visual vocabulary and what meaning their designs can have for the people that will be using them.”
At the core of the reconstruction is the Sharp Centre for Design, named after OCAD alumna Rosalie Sharp. The founders of the Four Seasons Hotel donated $5 million — by far the largest gift OCAD has received — and essentially jump-started a $17-million fundraising campaign to pay for the project. Amidst the renovations at the Royal Ontario Museum and the beginnings of a new opera house a couple of blocks away, OCAD’s new structure is easily one of the most exciting building projects underway in Toronto, casting the institution in the light of a landmark that will finally exemplify its mandate for art and design.
Founded in 1876 as the Ontario School of Art, the creative emporium turned into a college in 1912. By 1996, the school officially became the Ontario College of Art & Design. Its long list of graduates are known for playing a significant role in shaping the visual culture and designed environment of Canada, including most of the “Group of Seven” artists as well as Michael Snow, Barbara Astman and Anita Kunz. Now with a revamped identity underway, the college hopes to rekindle a sense of its significance among the public and highlight more of its outstanding artists and achievements.
“This building is a metaphor for what’s happening (at the college),” says Richards, beaming over OCAD’s recent graduation to degree status. Despite being a part of Ontario’s university sector, OCAD only upgraded from diploma status last year. While tuition for the college’s rigorous four-year program has always cost the same as fine arts programs at York, Ryerson and the University of Toronto, students would only graduate with a diploma, making it difficult for many people to understand that OCAD offered an education comparable to that of leading schools like the Rhode Island School of Design and the Memphis College of Art.
With the new degree status in effect, about 200 alumni are returning to their studies to obtain their bachelor of arts. Coinciding with this significant change is the addition of a new research lab. It will facilitate studying vast areas of design previously untapped by OCAD, thereby advancing the discipline of design and OCAD’s place in the university sector.
“This entire transformation is important,” says Alsop, explaining that from day one the design process always included presentations to the college and to the community. “People came and spoke their mind at City Hall. They gave impassioned speeches for and against this project. And I think we’ve emerged with something everyone’s contributed to in a meaningful way, including the neighbourhood.”
Ultimately with OCAD’s transformation, student and faculty conversations will once again find their place in comfortable common areas equipped with wireless technology; computers will find their way into each classroom for student use; labs will spark endless creation, whether the medium is clay, wood, paint or stone; art will hang on display in outdoor presentation areas, encircled by towering pencil crayon-like stilts and the greenery of the Grange Park. After 127 years, OCAD will have a campus — just don’t expect students to file into class on a conveyor belt and jet home in an airborne bubble car.
“If it’s going to be a college of art and design, it has to be about experimentation and taking risks,” says Caldwell. “And this building is about that. If it challenges people’s imaginations and those of our students … and defies their expectations — in this case, defying gravity to a certain extent — then that’s a good thing because that’s what art and design is about.”
