November 30, 2003
The ugliest building in the world
The board of the Ontario College of Art must have been dropped on its collective heads, because they just approved the above design for their new building. It's so ugly that I am completely bereft of words. I'll let the folks at Eyesore of the Month do the talking, since they -- quite sensibly -- bestowed the award on this ghastly exercise in CAD design:
Behold the new $30 million Ontario College of Art & Design classroom and studio building by British architect Will Alsop -- a totemized retro-futuroid coffee table joined umbilically to its Soviet-style predecessor below. The message, apparently: art and design are nothing but fun fun fun. Nothing to get serious about. A playful spirit of induced hazard will keep students wondering when the checkered box might wobble free of its cute swizzle-stick legs and come crashing down on their heads. This exercise in hyper-entropic avant garde faggotry is so cutting edge that it is already out of date. The only question: which of the two conjoined buildings is more cruelly ridiculous?
Okay, "faggotry" might not be quite the word I'd use myself, but otherwise I couldn't agree more. I'm from Toronto originally, and the sad thing is, this building may not even be the ugliest one in town. the city has very strange architecture: Lovely Victorian buildings are mixed cheek-by-jowl with brutalist concrete nightmares that look as if they'd been picked up from Vladivostock, or perhaps a Doctor Who episode.
(Thanks to the J-Walk blog for this one!)
Posted by Clive Thompson at November 30, 2003 09:43 PM
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Yeah, I've been aghast by this ever since I first saw it over a year ago. The architect's site goes into it a bit:
http://www.alsoparchitects.com/
They have some other "meh" building designs.
And yeah, Toronto architecture is rather dull... but at least some of the more cultural institutions are getting off their collective asses and trying to do something about it. The new ROM designs are interesting; and I've heard that they are getting Gehry to design extensions to the Art Gallery of Ontario. It's a start. Now if only we could tear down and replace some of those generic 60s skyscrapers.
And don't forget, you can watch them build this monstrosity:
http://www.ocad.on.ca/watchusbuild/index.html
Gaaaah! *Interactive* ugliness.
Yeesh - a building that makes the Holiday Inn wedding cake monstrosity on King St W look *restrained* [disgusted shudder].
I've not had the pleasure of seeing this thing in person, but a friend of my previous employer was working on a 3d model fly-by for the opening or something a few months ago in our store's back office (his home computer had blown up, and he was under deadline), and I glanced over his shoulder to see what he was working on...He told me the new OCAD building. I looked more closely...then again...then I asked him how far he'd gotten on the model of the addition: he said "it's done, I'm doing the animation now."
I replied, "You're kidding. That box is the building?"
He gave me a cocked-eyebrow-yeah-can-you-believe-this-shit? look that spoke volumes.
Unfortunately, my new boss is on-the-board-of, in some-such capacity of OCAD, and discussion of it's manifest and numerous failings would be impolitic (the office manager and I had a whispered, "can you fucking believe it?"-type discussion once, but we certainly felt like we were walking on thin ice...).
Sheesh, and there are so many COOL buildings in T'ronah, too: City Hall; The Children's Book Library on College (I can't remember it's proper name, but I love the gryphons); Casa Loma (in it's what-the-fawk? kinda way); The Distillery District buildings are a recent discovery for me, and well worth exploring; Dupont Subway station (in it's "Release the Kraken!" nautical/nautilus kind of way); (to name but a few off-the-top-of-my-head), and even the CN Tower has some style to it (to quote The Frantics: "A big dick")...
I think someone's driving vision of the whole thing was "How can be be controversial, and do it on an educational budget?" Seems to me they found just the perfect solution to fill that vision.
And I'm really not impressed with Daniel Liebeskind's vision for the ROM, at all...
When I first walked by the picture of this beast on McCaul street, I thought someone was kidding. Then they started erecting the thing (actually I'm surprised the board "just" approved it, because it's been under construction for some time) and I saw the support struts going up one by one...
Every single OCA expat I've spoken to thinks this building is the stupidest thing since stupid was invented. It completely ruins the surrounding neighbourhood.
Word on the inside is that the designers/builders have been warned about fire safety issues related to the design. How many exits could there possibly be out of that structure? Do people slide down the support struts?
Ahahaah! Good point. That looks like the least-evacuatable building I've ever seen in my life.
Bud, I can't believe you were forced to behold that nightmare before it was constructed. I almost feel like throwing out my computer now that the monitor has displayed a picture of it even once. It's been ruined.
a buddy of mine lives across the street and had a 24h cam trained on that monstrosity. unfortunately his cam has moved on to other things, but a link trail lead me to a site that was trying to showcase the building by hijacking his image stream.
what's hilarious is that the OCAD page on this showcase site now has a caption that reads "Jason's OCAD ugly building cam".
for an added treat... click on the "OCAD with Music" link below. not only does it have an animated flythrough of the building, it has some midi music at its finest!
Okay, that midi music might actually be *worse* than even the building.
Is there a collection of Bad MIDI Music anywhere online? There really ought to be. That stuff is like the musical version of genocide. "Acousticide"?
Is there such a thing as a site with *good* MIDI music?
Dictionaraoke has some nice selections of bad MIDI with the bonus of bad synthetic voices- http://www.dictionaraoke.org/
Lord, some of the music at that place! That MIDI version of XTC's "Senses Working Overtime" is almost brilliant ...
ooog.
while reading the OCAD site, infecting myself with their obvious and misplaced enthusiasm for this Space Age Bachelor Degree Launch Pad, I discovered that my new boss is, in fact, the Chair of the Capital Campaign that's responsible for raising the funds...
Also, the "OCAD ugly building cam" seems to be offline for now...
You people are all just being sour. The building is going to be totally excellent hella wicked great.
It looks like a big giant birthday cake! Upside down! Supported by its candles!
See? Now you like it, don't you?
Hey, now I *love* it!
Bud, my condolences for being shunted one degree of separation closer to the folks responsible for that mess.
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You can't say "hella" and "wicked" in the same sentence!!
To address this issue, we turn to the second place to put variables, which is called the Heap. If you think of the Stack as a high-rise apartment building somewhere, variables as tenets and each level building atop the one before it, then the Heap is the suburban sprawl, every citizen finding a space for herself, each lot a different size and locations that can't be readily predictable. For all the simplicity offered by the Stack, the Heap seems positively chaotic, but the reality is that each just obeys its own rules.
When Batman went home at the end of a night spent fighting crime, he put on a suit and tie and became Bruce Wayne. When Clark Kent saw a news story getting too hot, a phone booth hid his change into Superman. When you're programming, all the variables you juggle around are doing similar tricks as they present one face to you and a totally different one to the machine.
This is another function provided for dealing with the heap. After you've created some space in the Heap, it's yours until you let go of it. When your program is done using it, you have to explicitly tell the computer that you don't need it anymore or the computer will save it for your future use (or until your program quits, when it knows you won't be needing the memory anymore). The call to simply tells the computer that you had this space, but you're done and the memory can be freed for use by something else later on.
The Stack is just what it sounds like: a tower of things that starts at the bottom and builds upward as it goes. In our case, the things in the stack are called "Stack Frames" or just "frames". We start with one stack frame at the very bottom, and we build up from there.
Our next line looks familiar, except it starts with an asterisk. Again, we're using the star operator, and noting that this variable we're working with is a pointer. If we didn't, the computer would try to put the results of the right hand side of this statement (which evaluates to 6) into the pointer, overriding the value we need in the pointer, which is an address. This way, the computer knows to put the data not in the pointer, but into the place the pointer points to, which is in the Heap. So after this line, our int is living happily in the Heap, storing a value of 6, and our pointer tells us where that data is living.
Being able to understand that basic idea opens up a vast amount of power that can be used and abused, and we're going to look at a few of the better ways to deal with it in this article.
When the machine compiles your code, however, it does a little bit of translation. At run time, the computer sees nothing but 1s and 0s, which is all the computer ever sees: a continuous string of binary numbers that it can interpret in various ways.
Seth Roby graduated in May of 2003 with a double major in English and Computer Science, the Macintosh part of a three-person Macintosh, Linux, and Windows graduating triumvirate.
The Stack is just what it sounds like: a tower of things that starts at the bottom and builds upward as it goes. In our case, the things in the stack are called "Stack Frames" or just "frames". We start with one stack frame at the very bottom, and we build up from there.
Since the Heap has no definite rules as to where it will create space for you, there must be some way of figuring out where your new space is. And the answer is, simply enough, addressing. When you create new space in the heap to hold your data, you get back an address that tells you where your new space is, so your bits can move in. This address is called a Pointer, and it's really just a hexadecimal number that points to a location in the heap. Since it's really just a number, it can be stored quite nicely into a variable.
i love the ocad building! its a cow with long think colourful legs!!
