Results tagged “willalsop”

Starting your art collection? Start small. At OCAD's sixth annual Whodunit? Mystery Art Sale on Saturday, you'll have over 800 pieces to choose from—all 5½" x 7½", all $75.00. Buy your favourite, then turn it over to reveal the name of artist. Depending on your luck and sleuthing skill, you could end up with a big-name bargain: in addition to the usual Canadian artists and OCAD alumni, faculty and students, this year's special contributors...

We publish a lot of articles here on Torontoist, and sometimes it's hard to keep up with all of them. Populist is a weekly recap intended for the casual Torontoist reader, featuring some of the coolest, most interesting, most commented, and most recommended posts from the past week on Torontoist. Populist will appear every Sunday night.

Blame international architect Will Alsop for the latest Queen West trend.

Everyone's been reporting on the Tim Horton's explosion/fire but the Sun gets at the most important question, just what will this do to Tim Horton's stockholders? The answer, probably not much.

Because this map makes it look like OCAD is being turned into a theme park. Well, that's probably only half-true. Tommorow, first year interaction students at the art school are turning the area underneath Will Alsop's tabletop into a giant showcase of their work which includes things like:

Chinese architect Yongsang Ma has won the Mississauga competition to design the Absolute tower in Mississauga. The lithe looking glass tower was a heavy favourite to win the contest and he beat out six other finalists.

Someone please fire the marketing team at Landmark Building Group. The marketers at this developer's have come up with this painfully obnoxious video advertising their lofts. We've seen better acting and production from late night spots and these ads simply scream gentrification. The video touts the location of their project (right across from the Drake) and has one of the most asinine slogans we've seen in recent memories ("Are you on the list?"). It's a slogan that reminds us of power-tripping bouncers at overpriced clubs on Richmond Street. Just wait until all those yuppies move into the neighbourhood and start complaining about the noise that bars like the Drake and the Beaconsfield make.

The City presented its annual Architecture and Urban Design awards at a gala dinner last week presided over by Mayor Miller and the city's poet laureate Giorgio di Ciccio (no, we weren't aware of this either). Of particular note: the coveted Building in Context Award of Excellence was presented to Will Alsop's OCAD Sharp Centre, praised by the judges for being 'cocky and attractively humorous, an element in the urban scene that holds its own with tough urbanity while allowing new public space to open up beneath it". If by 'new public space', you mean being able to stand under the Centre's Rainbow Brite legs staring skyward at the 'modernism sucks' graffiti, TOist agrees.

We were shaking our heads in disappointment when Mayor Miller announced that the city would support empowerment of the Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corp. (TWRC), but only if he was placed on its board- a familiar story of bureaucratic stalemate. The recent announcement of the Waterfront Design Review Panel, however, is surely a sign of hope in repairing this city's post-war urban planning faux pas.

Well, we don't know what practicing artist and soon to be OCAD President Sara Diamond has on her OCAD to do list, but one of those line items will definitely include defending Will Alsop's tabletop from Pugly commendation (see below). In keeping with OCAD's tradition of hiring practicing artistes, Ms. Diamond is both video/installation artist and current director of research at the Banff Centre and artistic director of the Banff New Media Institute. She also looks a wee bit like Betsey Johnson.