Sharp Centre for Design
Will Alsop / Alsop Architects · Toronto, Canada · 2004
The Sharp Centre for Design is a pixel-patterned black-and-white box raised several stories above OCAD University on brightly colored steel legs. Will Alsop’s design preserves ground-level space and existing campus buildings while creating a highly visible new studio floor floating above the city block. The deliberately improbable composition turns structural support into graphic identity and makes the school instantly recognizable within downtown Toronto. Opened in 2004, it is one of the city’s clearest examples of playful early twenty-first-century institutional architecture.