The sight of arts students asleep on sofas in the Barbara Frum Atrium may soon be a thing of the past.
For the past few years, the Toronto CBC building has rented out space to the International Academy of Design and Technology. In addition to much of the 8th floor, the Academy had ground floor space and took over a separate bank of elevators.
Today, CBC announced that it had “reached a mutually satisfactory agreement with the Academy that they will vacate the Broadcasting Centre as of April 2009.”
The move will allow CBC to reorganize its space for internal use, and organize leased space vertically on the west side of the building. And it will create something staffers like me have clamored for forever: ground-floor access to stairs. (I work on the second floor, but there’s no way to get between there and the ground without taking an elevator. Or pulling the fire alarm.)
Still, I’ll miss the students. At first it seemed to me like an uneasy match, with black-clad youngsters, replete with iPods and portfolio cases loafing around between classes, while CBCers eyed them suspiciously and clutched their laptops. But the Academy grew on me. Being around young people is a good thing, and having the school there made the CBC building part of the neighbourhood. Fortunately, the new plans for the building have neighbourhood involvement as a core tenet (along with finding a new core tenant.)
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Stairs from the second floor would be fantastic. No more snarky comments from people in the elevator when I press 2!
Like many employees I was never a fan of the International Academy of Smokers. The Academy tried to use its location within the CBC Broadcast Centre as a selling point to prospective students, somehow implying a formal connection with CBC. The school itself was also a collection of kids who couldn’t get into the prestigeous art schools in Canada and instead had to fork over tens of thousands of dollars to a private school which lured them into thinking they would become Canada’s next big fashion designers, video-game programmers and movie directors. Hundreds of those pimply nose-piereced kids would pass through the doors of the Academy each year. On the other hand, it was a steady source of revenue for CBC. The corporate e-mail from CBC suggests the departure of the Academy is a good thing because now we can renovate the space and make even better use of it. What’s that old expression? ‘money talks and… ‘
It’s more likely that the students are the ones keeping a close eye on their laptops. Most of the ones I see them with are way better than my work computer!
I hope they don’t take their sofas, though!
Isn’t that the Colorado Avalanche logo?
Anybody know where they are moving to?