Time Canada

Toronto has been mostly a boom town in recent years, but it’s still not the kind of place where the skyline has much to say. Silvery condo towers are going up everywhere, cool and glassy and handsome enough, but the last really interesting building to emerge in the city was Viljo Revell’s curvaceous City Hall, a suave municipal flourish completed almost 40 years ago. Or at least that’s how it felt until the Sharp Center for Design, a new addition to the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD), started rising on McCaul Street last year in the city’s downtown. Now that it’s complete, it is plain that the Sharp Center, which has its official opening this week, marks the real beginning of the 21st century in Toronto. In a city where so many buildings go about on tiptoe, who expected one that takes a walk on the wild side?