will alsop in toronto

[Paul Clerkin]

http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1073043288858&call_pageid=968350130169&col=969483202845

[helloinsane]

Also http://www.ocad.on.ca/, with some sequential construction shots at http://www.ocad.on.ca/watchusbuild/index.html

It's quite arresting right now - the box is enclosed. Mmm, floaty box.

[MG]

Very arresting -- the building hovering over the neighbourhood is very Thunderbirds.

[Paul Clerkin]

Kind off ungainly to me - like the martian's machines in War of the Worlds....

[helloinsane]

There's a slight slope to the street from south to north which helps it, but I've always thought Alsop had a strange concept of scale.

[Paul Clerkin]

With you on that....

[helloinsane]

Some fresh pictures here. Still big and floaty, especially as a white box against a white sky.

[Paul Clerkin]

the cladding will look fabulous against a blue sky - still thinking War of the Worlds

[sw101]

yeesh

[MG]

Any idea of what the internal spaces will be like?

[helloinsane]

Haven't heard - it's a teaching facility, so I'd imagine it's mainly studio space. I'm kicking myself I didn't get pictures of it when it was just an open frame steel box. Now *that* was cool...

[MG]

Any more photos?

[helloinsane]

Took some at lunchtime, will upload them this evening. I've gotten it into my head that it should have been an open ended box at the north and south ends (amazing lake view).

[helloinsane]

New images here. First warm day of the year...

[Paul Clerkin]

Looks good - can you send me hi-res ones for throwing up on canada.archiseek.com? usual email paul@archeire.com

[Paul Clerkin]

Thanks for the photographs...
Anyone interested can see larger shots here:

http://canada.archiseek.com/ontario/toronto/ocad/index.html

[MG]

Looking good - shocking!
What's the local reaction?

[L1]

Just been to see it, although not the internal spaces, I was worried about the shadows, but even though I have not seen it in bright sunshine, I do not think these will be so bad as in other parts of the downtown. As usual with Alsop some shoddy bits, but bringing the cladding round the soffit is great and it doesn't look expensive. Hey does anyone know who built the kind of crinkly rusty gold-coloured skyscraper not far from The Dominion ?

[Paul Clerkin]

Building Design
Letters page

Maybe I am the only architect who looked at your front cover picture “Table for Toronto” (News April 16) and thought, “Thank God I don’t live in Canada”.

That poor defenceless Victorian building being trodden on by an invader from another world of class unpleasantness. What a streetscape. Graffiti walls, hideous coloured raking poles and a box of tricks from Lego.

Call this architecture. And it’s for a design college.

Tony Aspinall, East Sussex

[helloinsane]

Not a single sentence in that letter is properly constructed. Wonder what it looked like before the editors got to it?

I'm no great fan of Alsop's work, but this kind of puerile, doom-saying critique is a little simplistic coming from an architect. The grafitti walls are actually a mural on the temporary museum building just down the street, and the 'poor victorian' is a fairly pedestrian townhouse forward of the overhang [objects in photographs may be further apart than they appear].

[sw101]

it's a minger alright...

[Paul Clerkin]

So you don't like it?

[sw101]

it's very much an advertisment for alsop rather than a beneficial insert into the area methinks...

don't know the area or the setting but from the images it just comes across as being so...wrong....out of place....other worldly and such like..

it just seems very insensitive, which is a bad thing in my book