Table manners

25 June 2004

Will Alsop's redevelopment of the Ontario College of Art & Design is an audacious intervention in the heart of Toronto's downtown. A new tabletop building supported on a series of splayed steel legs has been floated nine storeys above the original college. Alsop has injected Toronto with hallucinatory design. But the raucous look of the building is tempered by a remarkable new urban square located underneath the elevated college.

Established in 1876, the Ontario College of Art & Design (Ocad) is Canada's oldest design institution. The college is an integral part of the art scene in Toronto, sandwiched as it is between the creative hustle of Queen Street West and the Art Gallery of Ontario, undergoing a major redevelopment by Canadian-born Frank Gehry. But Ocad was bursting at the seams. A revamping of the high school educational system in the province meant a doubling in the number of first-year students — they began flooding the gates last September while the college was still under construction.

Toronto is a city defined by its Victorian "bay-n-gable" houses and its slab towers. Alsop's design picks up the slab tower and pitches it horizontally. Clad in a pixellated, black-and-white pattern, the tabletop can be spied from many visual corridors throughout the city. It is a startling icon. Admittedly, more than one flying trope in the city would be too many.

Alsop's work is not all honky-tonk. For Toronto, this Brit's intelligence as an urban designer has won over the city. By lifting the building into the sky, new territory at ground level has been discovered for the 2.5 million people who live in Toronto. A large public square extends from the art college; its nine-storey high canopy protects students and visitors from the elements, without robbing them of natural light. For local residents, the lift of the 163m-long tabletop means they have direct access to the historic Grange Park, which lies behind the college. The park has suffered in the recent past from elevated drug use and crime, a problem that will be discouraged by local residents walking more frequently into the area behind the college.

Besides the tabletop, the existing brick building has been gutted to introduce a light-filled entrance lobby which rises the equivalent of four storeys. Another exhibition and gathering space rising three storeys high is set more deeply into the plan of the existing college building. There is a toughness, too, to the interior — the concrete elevator shaft provides the structural core for the building and concrete floors are used throughout. Windows with deep sills are painted a series of bright colours, creating desirable alcoves for students, as well as animating the exterior facade.

What disappoints about the interior of the tabletop is the way that the monumental scale has been broken down into dry-walled offices and studios. Having experienced the building during and after construction, including the time when it was an open steel cage the length of a football field, it hurts to see such an exhilarating universal space transformed into a fairly ordinary series of work spaces.

For the new millennium, Toronto was in the mood for irreverence. As a painter who eventually discovered architecture, Alsop was naturally inclined to the creative juices of the college. He was intent on creating a factory for the making of art and design, so he consulted with students and staff, then local residents, in a series of art and ideas workshops.

The concept for elevating the new centre of design above the street was quick to emerge not only because it created a new square underneath but because it provided clear views to Grange Park. The conviviality of the exercise went far to inspire good public relations between the college, Alsop and the community. The neighbours seemed genuinely pleased by the design, and gave the redevelopment their blessing. They have not always been so easy to seduce, having delayed a renovation of the Art Gallery of Ontario by Barton Myers by some three years. But the Alsop design satisfied.

It cleared the city's rezoning process two months after being introduced.

In its first iteration, a flying rectangle was presented with its underside painted hot pink, its walls drenched in primary colours. In the months that followed, the essential parti of the tabletop hovering over the existing, renovated college stayed consistent. Formally titled the Sharp Centre for Design, the building houses departments of advertising, graphic design, illustration, and environmental and industrial design.

What did shift was the concept for the cladding, from one of brightly coloured panels to one that would distort the scale of the two-storey flying box. The architects favoured the overall pattern of pixellated patches to honour the digital age. The windows, too, would be used as parts in the design rather than to distinguish one storey from another. An emergency stair shaft, running diagonally to the underside of the tabletop, is clad in an opaque custom-red aluminum.

Alsop and Greg Woods, Ocad's project manager for Robbie Young & Wright, recommended to the client that a pixellated cladding, made up of hundreds of different shingles, could be manufactured in huge sheets at a factory. The windows could be inserted directly into the cladding. At the same time, the architects started exploring some of Europe's innovative materials, such as ETFE, as used by Nicholas Grimshaw to clad his geodesic greenhouses at the Eden Project in Cornwall.

But cost overruns for the cash-strapped college ruled out the factory assembly of hi-tech materials. At one point, a disgruntled Alsop specified that the flying tabletop be clad in black corrugated iron — akin to a flying coffin.

Eventually, the final splattering of black and white pixellated image went up. It is a satisfactory response, although likely to date quickly once the digital age gives way to another. The heavy-gauge corrugated iron is a rough material without the kind of sensual tonal shifts of titanium, the material specified by Gehry for part of the new Art Gallery of Ontario.

Originally the college had asked for a total of 10,700sq m of new and renovated space but only 8,400sq m are now being provided. A two-level underground development for parking and photography studios has been cut. The most beguiling aspects of the original Alsop design, including lily pad shapes floating beneath the flying rectangle, are also gone. The budget has been increased from CAN$38 to $42.5 million (£17 million), more than half the money coming from a cultural building program sponsored by the Ontario government.

That Alsop found a way to infiltrate the ranks of Toronto designers is largely down to the malaise that architect Greg Woods felt about his city. After reading a Globe & Mail newspaper article by this writer about the architectural mediocrity of Toronto, Woods was provoked to enter the Ocad competition with a stellar team. The young architect was determined to find a known entity to help break the mold of sober design in Toronto. He contacted a friend in London who worked for Alsop and offered a joint venture with Robbie Young & Wright Architects. Rod Robbie is largely responsible for the Toronto Skydome stadium, which he designed with a retractable roof.

Having completed the Ocad to high ratings of public approval, Alsop is hungry for more work in North America. Alsop Architects and Robbie Young & Wright have formed a Canadian office in the hopes of snagging another lucky competition. They recently lost a competition to redevelop the Vancouver Art Gallery, a project handed instead to Los Angeles architect Michael Maltzan. But watch for it: the funky intelligence of the art college in Toronto is sure to hit another North American city soon.