User:Al12si/OCAD

The article documents information about OCAD University that will probably never make it to the official article due to political reasons (as in “Wikipedia politics”).

Pronunciation

See also: Canadian abbreviations with unusual pronunciations

All the interesting pronunciation information has been deleted from the page, leaving only the uninteresting bit. I’m not going to go into an edit war to put anything there.

But the interesting bit is this: OCAD U is often written OCADU (students often even write OCADu), but even when it is written OCADU it is still pronounced as /'o 'kæd 'ʔju/, stressed on all three syllables and with a glottal stop between OCAD and U. It is never pronounced */'o 'kæ 'du/ by any current student or faculty (meaning an alumni might use an incorrect pronunciation since they might have never heard how the acronym is pronounced).

How to read OCAD room numbers (before mid-February 2015)

This information has been deleted without explanation from the OCAD University article. Since this is extremely important information (as any visitor to our campus will be able to attest) and I don’t want to get into an edit war I’ll just repost it here.

Before mid-February 2015, unlike what most other universities do, OCAD did not identify room numbers with an alphanumeric building code, but instead relied on referring to the building’s street address. A number of buildings also had a building number which was almost never directly used but instead encoded into a system of 4-digit room numbers, essentially making OCAD room numbers a form of UUID. The existence of “building numbers” could be easily inferred (e.g., by any thinking student) but had never been acknowledged until a new room number system was announced mid-February 2015^[1] when “building #7” was explicitly mentioned in the announcement.

In short, in any 4-digit room number the first digit is always the building number; the second digit generally, but not always, indicates what is officially referred to as the level (i.e., floor number). Three-digit room numbers without an address refer to rooms at 100 McCaul, which suggests 100 McCaul was bulding 0.

The significance of this (bizarre, if you will) system cannot be underestimated. While in other universities you may see room numbers such as MC 5110, ENG LG04 or Galbraith Building, Room 202 (so that the uninitiated visitor will ask, for example, “Where is the MC building?” and know to get to the 5th floor once the building is found), at OCAD you will often just see “Room 7401” (i.e., you are supposed to know this is at 205 Richmond and on the 4th floor and not the 7th), “Room 1510” (and know this is in the Annex Building, on the 5th floor), or “Room 153” (and know this is in the Main Building), without any mention of a building name or address. I have personally seen confused visitors looking for a room in the wrong building (because a lot of people still mistakenly think that OCAD is just the building at 100 McCaul) and even current students thinking a room was in a certain building when in fact it is in a different building.

How to read OCAD student email ID’s

Prior to around 2015

Prior to around 2015 (before OCAD’s switchover to “Project Chroma”), in addition to an unpublicized numeric email ID (identical to the 2015–2020 system), students had an official email ID that was always 6 characters in length:

• First 2 letters – First and last initials
• Middle 2 digits – Year the student first registered
• Last 2 letters – Random salt for collision avoidance, perhaps also for security by obscurity

A student with an email ID of al12si therefore must be named A.L. and must have entered OCAD in 2012. (Which means the calendar year, not the academic year. Students in my program start our year in July; this confuses everyone, including health services.)

Students who hold or have held teaching assistantships or research assistantships are considered “faculty” and have, in addition to their own student email addresses, an additional “faculty” email with a more usual-looking initial + last name structure.

Between around 2015 to March 2020

Between around 2015 to March 2020, OCAD student email ID’s are entirely numeric and are identical to the student’s student number.

Note that OCAD student numbers are not OUAC reference numbers; OCAD has its own system that’s probably been inherited from its college days.

Since March 2020

OCAD adopted full name emails for students in March 2020 (as part of its move away from GSuite to Microsoft Exchange), abandonning all previous naming schemes. It’s not clear how they’re dealing with students with identical full names since the new naming scheme does not seem to use salting; there are reports of mails (from professors, for example) delivered to the the wrong students.

OCAD buildings

100 McCaul

As mentioned above, levels 1–4 (Main Building) and levels 5–6 (Sharp Centre for Design) at 100 McCaul are considered two separate buildings, even though experientially they are one and the same and they also share the same street address. The complex as a whole is often referred to as the “main building” even though technically speaking Main Building is only levels 1–4.

The Sharp Centre for Design is referred to by some (for example some alumni) as the “new building” even though there are now many buildings newer than the “new building”.

The huge “OCAD University” lettering on the building’s exterior glass wall was installed just before Graduate Exhibition (GradEx) in 2013.

Around the beginning of July 2014 additional new signage was put at the front entrance labelling it both as the “Main Building” and the “Sharp Centre for Design”.

Because 100 McCaul is unmarked in the old room numbering system, under the old system 100 McCaul was conceptually building 0 (even though on maps actually showing building numbers without referring to them as such it was referred to as buildings A and B). In Febuary 2015 a new room number system replaced the old system; under the new system 100 McCaul is building MCA (“McCaul building 1”).

205 Richmond

Notable about the building at 205 Richmond is that it has a Lower Level (implicitly numbered level 0), and that street level is neither Level 1 nor Lower Level. (If we have to assign a floor number to the entrance lobby it would have to be Level ½ – very Harry Potter–ish.) This completely violates OCAD’s current floor numbering scheme – where floor numbers should start at Level 1^[2] –, but it has most certainly been inherited from whatever floor numbering the building used before OCAD acquired the building.

And some trivia: Until some time in the summer semester of 2013, the elevator at 205 Richmond Street West had buttons placed in reverse order – bottom floors at the top and top floors at the bottom. They fixed it before I had to chance to take a proper photograph of it, unfortunately. (I had a whole year to take the picture but never did… I felt too out of place in that building.)

The OCAD Student Union moved to 205 Richmond in May 2014, taking up an entire half of Level 5 – presumably as a result of an old tenant’s lease expiring.

In May 2014 new “OCAD University” signage replaced the old “Ontario College of Art and Design” signage. This must have happened around the same time as the SU’s move, because the signage was up by the time the SU posted removal notices on campus – with a photo that was still showing the old signage on the building.

In the old room numbering system 205 Richmond was building 7; in the new system it is building RHA (“Richmond building 1”).

49 McCaul

The building has an identity crisis. It used to be known by some as the IDI building. At one point (summer 2013) there was a sign that just mentioned one program (forgot which one). It is now known primarily as the Open Gallery, even though the building is almost never open.

In July 2013 new “OCAD University” signage replaced the old “Ontario College of Art and Design” signage. However, the sign was installed in such a way that looks like whoever did the specs did not even bother to do a site visit (i.e., the new sign looks wrong…).

In the old room numbering system 49 McCaul was building 4; in the new system it is building MCG (“McCaul building 7”).

51 McCaul

Two things happened in 2014: The first was that students were given access to the building the same hours as the Main Building, making the building useful as a useful study space with computers and a printer. The second was the OCAD Student Union’s move during May 2014 to 205 Richmond, taking the printer and all but one computer with them, rendering the space useless as a study space. According to an SU rep (May 2014, probably the 19th), the building at 51 McCaul is going to be “torn down” (not literally) and converted into a store.

New “OCAD University” signage also replaced the old “Ontario College of Art and Design” signage in 2014, in May if I remember correctly.

On June 9, an official announcement was posted to the OCAD Facebook page announcing that the first floor of 51 McCaul is going to be the new home of the OCAD bookstore.^[3]

In the old room numbering system 51 McCaul was building 5; in the new system it is building MCF (“McCaul building 6”).

Major exhibition spaces

According to an outdated web page (dated 9/7/2012 10:39:29 AM) retrieved on February 28, 2014^[4] major exhibition spaces at OCAD were:

• The OCAD Professional Gallery, located in the Main Building on Level 2 (now renamed Onsite [at] OCAD U, located at 240 Richmond Street West; the old gallery in the Main Building has been renamed the Anniversary Gallery and is hardly ever used);
• The Student Gallery, located at 285 Dundas St. West, just east of Dundas and McCaul (now located at 52 McCaul Street);
• Transit Space, located in the Main Building on Level 2; and
• The Great Hall, located in the Main Building on Level 2

An old campus map from 2010 still shows the Onsite gallery (named “Onsite [at] OCAD” instead of “Onsite [at] OCAD U”) as being within the Main Building^[5]. That might explain why it is called the “Onsite” gallery.

Around May 2014 or so, new signage was installed at the Onsite gallery which simply says “Onsite Gallery, OCAD University”. The old, bizarre “Onsite [at] OCAD U” signage is now gone even though the old name is still being used in official announcements. The Onsite gallery was shut down some time mid-2015 to prepare for moving to a new building that was still being built.

Transit Space was renamed the Ada Slaight Student Gallery some time in the fall of 2015.

OCAD history

Sources for early and not-so-early OCAD history:

• Ontario Ministry of Government Services. Early Purchases and the Foundation of Art Education. Retrieved from http://www.archives.gov.on.ca/en/explore/online/osa/purchases.aspx – Detailed coverage of early history from 1876 to around 1884, including the specific date (October 30, 1876) of the school’s opening.
• Ontario Society of Artists: 100 Years: 1872–1972. Retrieved from http://ccca.concordia.ca/history/osa/english/references/osa100yr-2.html – Covers some history from 1876–1931 in the three short paragraphs under the heading “The formation of a School of Art”.
• Hume, C. (2011). 135 Years. In G. Grice (Ed.), Shift: Conventions (pp. 13–20). Toronto, Canada: OCAD U Student Press. Written by Toronto Star columnist Christopher Hume, this article is especially valuable in shedding light on the Sharp Centre for Design and the founders’ vision that the school should be a university right from the start.

The MGO and CCCA pages keep shifting to random locations so the links might or might not work, and Google might or might not be able to find the pages even if you have the right keywords. This is bad form, but the Web’s founding principals are often ignored these days.

OCAD is working on the history of the Dorothy H. Hoover Library. According to the information on that page, the library (not called Dorothy H. Hoover Library until 1987) was created in 1922.^[6]

Graduate Exhibition

The annual Graduate Exhibition (GradEx) used to be just for undergrad work, which was really not so surprising because OCAD’s grad programs were new. Grad work was first shown during GradEx in 2014, dedicating an entire building (49 McCaul) for showing the work.

Despite the fact that an entire building was dedicated for “Masterful” (the grad portion of GradEx), grad students were told that not all work could be shown because of “constraints of space”. When I went there to take a look I was shocked at the amount of empty space in the Open Gallery.

As it happened, there were also little directional signage to direct people to 49 McCaul – or 60 McCaul for that matter.

References