Sharp Centre for Design

The shoebox supported by knitting needles is the Sharp Centre for Design (Alsop Architects, 2004) at OCAD University in Toronto. OCAD was formerly the Ontario College of Art and Design, and originally the Ontario School of Art.

Although the building has won important awards (the first Royal Institute of British Architects Worldwide Award, the award of excellence in the "Building in Context" category at the Toronto Architecture and Urban Design Awards, most outstanding technical project overall in the 2005 Canadian Consulting Engineering Awards), it always finishes near the top in an annual survey of people's opinions of the ugliest buildings in Toronto, and features in a few videos on YouTube about the ugliest buildings in the world.

Off to the left is part of Frank Gehry's extension of the Art Gallery of Ontario. Inside the extension is a very effective art gallery, but as someone said to me about the outside, "It's no Bilbao" I'm not blaming Gehry -- Toronto is where great architects come to have their ideas thwarted by their committees. The one architect they couldn't defeat was Mies, who, of course, was known for his ability to drink any site foreman under the table, an ability he used to get things done his way.