Sharp Centre for Design/OCAD Press Pack

specially constructed tent structure at the steel yard. The finished legs, 29m in
length, were placed in pairs on tractor-trailer rigs similar to those used in the logging
industry, and hauled to site in Toronto, 120km away.
The table top’s exterior cladding, affixed on site, consists of a field of white aluminum
and a random pattern of black squares and rectangles that create a pixellated effect.
The design and placement of the windows and arrangement of the black pixels
intentionally blurs the distinction between floor plates and play with ideas of scale.
The pixilation wraps round to the underside of the building, helping the box to read as
one element balancing on long slender legs.
The table top was designed as a rigid steel box. A grid of steel verendale trusses run
in the north-south direction and east-west direction, occupying the depth of he box
itself.
Due to the unconventional way in which the main building structure is raised above
the ground plane, the structural engineers were further challenged by the effect of
wind on the underside of the building. It was determined, following a series of windtunnel
tests that under certain wind conditions, the continuous air-flow below the
table-top would cause the super-structure to react in a similar manner to an airfoil.
As a consequence of this empirical testing, it was necessary to design secondary
structure in the soffit that counteracted this effect.
The table-top is supported by the core and six pairs of legs. The splayed legs, the
building’s main structural columns, touch down at ground level in an apparent
random fashion. Although all the multi-coloured legs are the same diameter, five are
finished in black to give a ‘slimming’ appearance; The optical illusion is further
emphasized, when, at night, the black legs being less visible, seem to disappear,
adding to the dynamic effect of the building composition.
The distinct bright red diagonal element located to the south end of the underside of
the table contains an enclosed existing stairway. Conceived originally as a
translucent coloured element that would be lit from within at night, the final cladding
to this stair is an opaque custom red aluminum. As an object the striking red colour
is an appropriate visual foil to the random black and white pixilation of the underside
of the soffit.
Fundraising
The Ontario Provincial Government, under the banner of the SuperBuild Growth
Fund, was the main sponsor for the project. The government provided $24 million in
funding toward the College’s capital campaign and the College was responsible for
raising the balance of the $42.5 million project budget.
Alsop worked in tandem with OCAD’s capital campaign, dovetailing talks, lectures,
and interviews with the fundraising program. The publicity generated has helped
OCAD with its fundraising targets, while simultaneously raising OCAD’s local and
global profile. The new building will mesh with the revived urban fabric, contributing
distinctive design and revived public areas, internal and external, to this quarter of
the city.
Future
Since Alsop and RYWA were appointed to design the College extension other
international architects have won high profile building projects in the city, most
notably Frank Gehry’s AGO extension next door, Libeskind’s extension to the ROM
(Royal Ontario Museum) and Norman Foster’s building for the University of Ontario
Sharp Centre for Design/OCAD Press Pack
Alsop Architects
6