Head into the office tower at Bloor and Bay, wind your way past Gap Kids and down into the concourse, open a heavy door labelled WORKShop and you will see this: a plywood desk by Frank Gehry. A 1960s fireman’s helmet from Hong Kong. An art installation that arranges cheap melamine bowls into a symbolic emperor’s gate. And, all around you, an installation of colourful glass vials dispensing luscious odours of pine.

This - the vials, not the other stuff – is Scentscapes, a new show at the one-of-a-kind gallery Workshop. ”Scent Squadron,” an installation by Toronto architects Khoury Levit Fong, plays with the ideas of the traditional Chinese garden. It builds on a design for a public garden now being constructed in Xi’an, China (by a team led by Rodolphe El-Khoury). Both are intriguing projects: they appeal to the fifth of our five senses, using smell in a deliberate and cleverly abstract way.

And this work wouldn’t be shown anywhere else in  Toronto, other than perhaps the Architecture Gallery at Harbourfront. Few galleries make room for architecture, especially contemporary work, and that’s too bad; this sort of space helps start discussion about where the field is going, without any of the catcalls you get with a bold new building in construction.

Workshop provides a rough-and-ready venue for such discussion, thanks to Workshop head Larry Richards. His vision defines the place, and his sensibility is what brings in the Gehry desk (a relic rescued from the local offices of ad agency Chiat/Day), and the assorted pieces of Canadian and Chinese furniture around the edges of the room (see below).

In Toronto’s design world,  Richards is a real character. He’s been influential: as the dean at U of T’s School of Architecture, he attracted top designers to teach and build on campus, including Morphosis, Behnisch, Frank Gehry, Stephen Teeple, Kohn Shnier and Diamond Schmitt.

But more than that, he’s a fascinating figure. A courtly, softspoken fellow who’s taught at (and run) three schools of architecture; an activist for great design; sometime advisor to the rich and powerful; a connoisseur of high design with a sense of humour. At Workshop, where he’s found a canvas to express himself as a curator and designer. The gallery shows off objects, architecture and concepts at the intersection of Chinese and Western culture. Backing it is Hong Kong developer and fashion mogul Kin Yeung. Yeung’s fashion label, Blanc de Chine, has a similarly cross-cultural bent.

Yeung’s family also owns the tower, 80 Bloor West, which is why Workshop wound up in its odd location. You may have seen its display windows as you leave Bay subway station: It’s an old retail space, right next to the station’s most circuitous, least busy exit. That is an apt setting for Workshop, which as the name suggests is part business and part creative atelier. While they sell furniture and artwork, Yeung and Richards are also interested in spurring discussion.  They’ve sponsored competitions (for a shoe storage tower) and a furniture installation by a student designer, James Lennox.

The first Workshop show, Ming Modern, included furniture inspired by Ming-period craftsmanship. And it also included wildly imaginative proposals from a graduate architecture class in which Richards had his students imagine how to renovate the tower in keeping with Daoist principles. (The tower was designed by Peter Carter, once part of Mies van der Rohe’s Chicago office, and it is itself a quirky remnant of halfway-Miesian Toronto late modernism).

Richards has plans to expand the gallery into a vacant space across the hall – which is massive and currently a trove of fascinating junk.  Until then, take a few minutes to browse this modest space and check out the explorations and collections of a genuinely creative mind.