OCAD University
Ontario College of Art & Design University, commonly known as OCAD University or OCAD U, is a public art university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Its main campus is located within Toronto's Grange Park and Entertainment District neighbourhoods.
The university is co-educational and operates three academic faculties – the Faculty of Art, the Faculty of Arts and Science, and the Faculty of Design – which offer programs at the undergraduate and graduate levels, as well as certificate programs and continuing education courses. The university is one of four members of the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design located outside the United States.
Established by the Ontario Society of Artists in 1876 as the Ontario School of Art, it is the oldest operating school in Canada dedicated to art and design education. The school was renamed twice in 1886 and 1890 before it was provincially chartered under its new name, the Ontario College of Art, in 1912. With the inception of the college's design department in 1945, the OCA grew and later became the Ontario College of Art and Design in 1996. In 2010, the institution formally adopted its current title, including the university designation in its name to reflect its maturation and change in degree-granting powers.
In 2023, there were 4,890 undergraduates and 330 graduate students enrolled at the university. As of 2022, the university holds an association of over 25,000 alumni.
History
Early history
The institution was founded in 1876 by the Ontario Society of Artists with the objective to provide professional artistic training while furthering the development of art education in Ontario. On 4 April 1876, the Ontario Society of Artists passed the motion to "draw up a scheme" for a school of art, which later led to its creation on 30 October 1876, funded by a government grant of $1,000. The Ontario School of Art initially opened at 14 King Street West with a class of 14 students, headed by artist Thomas Mower Martin as the founding director, a position he held for the next three years. Fellow artists Robert Harris and William Cruikshank also joined the school, the latter serving as the school's president from 1884 to 1886.In 1882, the Ontario Department of Education assumed control over the school and transferred it to the Toronto Normal School. In 1886, the school was relocated to a building near Queen Street and Yonge Street and was renamed the Toronto Art School.
When the Ontario Society of Artists resumed sponsorship of the school in 1890, they renamed it the Central Ontario School of Art and Industrial Design and reopened it at the Princess Theatre, which also shared its premises with the Art Museum of Toronto.
20th century
In 1910, the school was again relocated, occupying 1 College Street as a result of the Princess Theatre's demolition. Two years later, the school was granted a charter by the Ontario government that authorized it to issue diplomas. The institution was incorporated as the Ontario College of Art with George Agnew Reid named as its first principal. Reid designed the first building owned by the college, which was also the first building in Canada built specifically for the education of artists and designers. The college moved, for the last time, to the new permanent property in 1921, which is still in use today.As a part of Reid's wider efforts to have visual arts accepted as part of the province's formal education system, Reid pushed for the OCA to potentially become a constituent college of the University of Toronto; however, the proposed amalgamation was never pursued.
In 1945, the OCA established a design school, broadening its education mandate. By the 1950s, the college had expanded beyond its downtown campus, operating classes in Port Hope, Ontario and at William Houston Public School in midtown Toronto. In 1957, the college's main campus received its first physical extension, which has since abutted the eastern side of the original schoolhouse. Three more expansions to the new building were followed in different years, which were 1963, 1967, and 1981 in response to increasing student enrolment.
Roy Ascott, who became OCA's former president from 1971 to 1972, radically challenged the structure of the college's curriculum. The overhaul of the college's curriculum put forward by Ascott anticipated future developments in art pedagogy but polarized the community at the time, hastening his departure from the college. In 1974, the institution launched its Florence foreign exchange program, which allowed students to study in Florence, Italy inside a dedicated building with studio spaces. The program was staffed by faculty members until the program was discontinued in 2017.
From 1979 to 1997, OCA also held classes at the Stewart Building, a building located north of the main campus at 149 College Street.
The institution remained the Ontario College of Art until 1996 when it was reorganized as the Ontario College of Art and Design, a change intended to recognize its inclusion of design education, raise its media and industry profile, as well as better position it for a transition from a diploma- to a degree-granting body. In the following year, the college entered into a partnership with the U.K.–based Open University to provide students the opportunity to obtain an Open University undergraduate degree.
21st century
The advent of the 2000s marked a significant era of transformation for the college, most notably in 2000 when funding was secured from Ontario's SuperBuild infrastructure program to build a major fifth extension to the Main Building. Through Canadian architect Rod Robbie, British architect Will Alsop was made aware of the project's call for proposals, and Alsop's ambitious "table top" design was ultimately selected in 2002. A joint venture was formed between the two individuals' firms to construct the new contemporary extension, which was completed in 2004 and named the Sharp Centre for Design after its benefactors Rosalie and Isadore Sharp.The college also underwent further changes to its internal operations whereby, in 2002, the Legislature of Ontario granted OCAD university status and the limited authority to confer bachelor's degrees in fine arts and design under its name. In 2007, authorization was extended to the conferring of graduate degrees, and the college accepted its first cohort of graduate students the next year. In 2008, the college was granted membership into the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, and in 2009, it began providing continuing education services to non-degree students through its School of Continuing Studies.
In the early years of Sara Diamond's tenure as president from 2005 to 2020, the institution saw a reformation of its pedagogy. Diamond emphasized academics over studio time, increasing the independence of the academic deans and requiring full-time instructors to hold a graduate or terminal degree. The curriculum was also changed to reduce the amount of classroom time versus studio time, increase the academic rigour of the college's programs, and push for digital media and design research classes. This caused some controversy as two faculty members resigned over the immense changes.
In 2010, the institution officially became the Ontario College of Art and Design University, and full degree-granting powers were subsequently awarded to the university on 1 July 2020 by the Government of Ontario, including the ability to confer its own honorary degrees.
Campus
During the university’s years as a nascent institution, it had relocated to several different buildings in Toronto, many of which have been decommissioned or demolished over time. Only in the early 20th century did the school establish its own purpose-built structure, on the grounds of what is now Grange Park, a two-hectare green space that was once the front lawn of a nineteenth-century estate. As a result, the university's campus is embedded within the surrounding neighbourhoods that have developed alongside it, rather than in an enclosed area with contiguous buildings, as is standard with most other post-secondary institutions. The current campus is spread across a combination of owned, co-owned, and leased properties in Toronto’s downtown core. The largest cluster of buildings is located in the Grange Park neighbourhood along McCaul Street, between Dundas Street and Queen Street West, and comprises the Main Building, Butterfield Park, the Annex Building, the Rosalie Sharp Pavilion, 49–51 McCaul Street, and 74–76 McCaul Street. Another group of buildings is situated south of the neighbourhood in the Entertainment District at 199, 205, and 230–240 Richmond Street West. 130 Queens Quay East in the East Bayfront is the university's "waterfront campus," which occupies 1,300 square metres of the building's fourth floor and forms part of a larger development called the Daniels Waterfront—City of the Arts. The campus in the Grange Park and Entertainment District precincts is accessible by public transportation via St. Patrick and Osgoode stations on Line 1, as well as the 505 Dundas and 501 Queen streetcar routes.OCAD U does not have any student residences on campus, though it offers students resources to search for off-campus accommodations in the city.
Academic buildings
Physically, the campus’s buildings vary in age and aesthetics, ranging from the revival architecture of the 19th century to the more contemporary design language of the present. Dating back to 1887, the oldest structures on campus are 74–76 McCaul Street, which are semi-detached Victorian houses that are not used as academic facilities, but have instead been converted into an independent art supply store for students, faculty, and the public. The George Reid Wing, the earliest component of the Main Building, was opened in 1921 and was designed by George Agnew Reid, an alumnus and principal at the then Ontario College of Art. The two-storey building is characterized by Georgian features similar to The Grange manor nearby, both of which front onto Grange Park. Under the Ontario Heritage Act, 74–76 McCaul Street and the George Reid Wing are classified as a listed and a designated heritage building, respectively.Likewise, the repurposed mid-rise buildings at the intersection of Richmond Street West and Duncan Street, including 205 and 240 Richmond, hold heritage status; they are among the few remaining brick warehouses from an industrial area formerly known as the Garment District, which existed in the early to mid-20th century. Previously called the New Textile Building, 205 Richmond is an Edwardian classical building that was acquired by the university in 2007. 240 Richmond occupies the former Richmond Duncan Building and is interconnected with 230 Richmond; both sites were acquired in 2008 and contain the university's main administration and services facilities, as well as private offices rented out to the co-working space company WeWork.Throughout the later half of the twentieth century, several modifications were made to Reid’s original building. On 17 January 1957, the first expansion to the building was inaugurated, a modernist extension known as the A.J. Casson Wing. The Nora E. Vaughan Auditorium, two additional floors, and an atrium were later added to the building through three extensions in 1963, 1967, and 1981. The most recent extension to the Main Building, known as the Sharp Centre for Design, radically departs from the previous modernist extensions, and more so from the Georgian Revival architecture of the historical building. Opening in 2004, the Sharp Centre for Design was conceived by British architect Will Alsop and came out of a participatory design process. The contemporary addition, often described as a table top, consists of a black and white box that is supported by a series of multi-coloured pillars at different angles. The achromatic steel box stands four storeys above the ground and measures 9 metres high, 31 metres wide, and 84 metres long, adding 7,440 square metres to the existing structure below. The $42.5-million expansion and redevelopment is regarded as an architectural landmark in the city, receiving numerous awards including the first Royal Institute of British Architects Worldwide Award, the award of excellence in the "Building in Context" category at the Toronto Architecture and Urban Design Awards, and was deemed the most outstanding technical project overall in the 2005 Canadian Consulting Engineering Awards.
As the college expanded, new buildings were added to the campus and the existing neighbourhood, namely the Annex Building and 49–51 McCaul Street, which were built in the 1970s as part of a larger mixed-use complex adjacent to the Main Building. As its name suggests, the Annex is an interconnected building, which shares its ground floor with a small retail concourse that serves the local, residential, and university communities. A distinct architectural feature of 49–51 McCaul is its unique placement within and around the McCaul Loop, a century-old streetcar terminus. In 1998, a separate 2.5-storey building at the corner of McCaul and Dundas Street was acquired and named the Rosalie Sharp Pavilion.
Further campus renovations and enlargements were followed in 2016 through the university’s Ignite Imagination campaign, which aimed to raise $60 million to renovate 95,000 sq ft of existing space while adding another 55,000 sq ft of new construction — the largest fundraiser in the university’s history. The two-phased project included the revamped interior and exterior of the Rosalie Sharp Pavilion, which incorporates a stainless steel facade scrim that is based on a map of Toronto. Along with the Art Gallery of Ontario, the pavilion is intended to act as a "gateway" to the university's premises by flanking the southern part of the Dundas-McCaul Street intersection.