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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
It must be tough to be a British architect these days if your name isn't Norman Foster or Richard Rogers. The most famous British architects since Christopher Wren are filling the world with so many sleek glass-and-steel buildings that it can be hard for their compatriots to get noticed. All the more reason to enjoy the rise, in recent years, of Will Alsop. Alsop, now fifty-nine, is the anti-Foster. His buildings are startling, but also whimsical, gentle, colorful, and modest. Alsop's playfulness makes him unusual--wit is in short supply among architects today--but his work, on closer inspection, is just as notable for the commonsensical attitudes it embodies.
The building that has done most to establish Alsop as an international figure is a bizarre structure in Toronto, the Sharp Center for Design, at the Ontario College of Art & Design. It is a slab, two hundred and seventy feet long and raised nine stories into the air on huge, slanted legs. The legs--red and yellow and black and blue and purple and white--look like a bunch of gigantic colored pencils, or pick-up sticks mid-fall. The slab, which accommodates two floors of classrooms, studios, and offices, is covered in white corrugated metal and decorated with...
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