Hughpearman.com

People are friendly in Toronto. They talk to you spontaneously in the street. "Interesting place, huh?" is a typical opening gambit when I am caught pointing my camera at Will Alsop's new Walking-City extension to the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD). Policemen and women on bicycles stop to chat. Streetcar drivers talk as they go. Even the beggars, of whom there are many, are strangely unthreatening to anyone hardened in the streets of European or American cities. They are all anxious to know: what do I think? Well, what I think is that Toronto is trying very hard to reinvent itself as a city of culture. That much is obvious. Alsop's OCAD building, an Op-Art composition perched high above the existing college buildings on colourful angled stilts, is just the first expression of a state-sponsored programme known as "Superbuild" in which this lakeshore city is making up for over a decade of neglect of its cultural patrimony - a neglect that was starting to show up on its balance sheet as tourist numbers began to drop.