[URBAN NOTE] "Ontario announces $27-million for rebuild of Toronto’s OCAD University"

[rfmcdonald]

I am all for the adventuresome architecture implied by Alex Bozikovic's article in The Globe and Mail.

The province will direct $27-million toward a rebuilding of OCAD University’s downtown Toronto campus that would give the institution long-awaited upgrades to its facilities and a new and improved public face.

The new funding was announced Tuesday by Reza Moridi, Ontario’s Minister of Training, Colleges and Universities. It will go toward the cost of what the university calls its Creative City Campus project. This is a series of additions, renovations and expansions to the complex of buildings along McCaul Street, next to the Art Gallery of Ontario, that houses most of the university.

The initiative, with a budget of roughly $60-million in total, will add 55,000 square feet of new area and make improvements to 94,700 square feet of existing space, with a focus on studios and social spaces for students.

It is the biggest set of changes to the campus since the school’s Sharp Centre for Design – the dramatic box-on-stilts by British architect Will Alsop – transformed the campus in 2004.

In interviews Monday, both the minister and the university’s president, Sara Diamond, stressed the civic character of the project. “This is going to be quite something for not only the university, but quite significant for the city of Toronto,” Mr. Moridi said. “The area is going to be transformed by this.”