After 50 years, TD Centre still stands out

Fifty years ago when the TorontoDominion Centre’s first black slab tower appeared on the city’s skyline it preceded Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey by a year. In the Kubrick film, an impenetrable black rectangular “monolith” lands on prehistoric Earth from some alien civilization, causing momentous things to happen.

Archival pictures of the TD Centre rising above Toronto in the mid-’60s has the same kind of resonance: a low-scaled, provincial city, with an assortment of buildings in various classic and colonial styles surround an austere black tower that seems like it landed from another planet.

The spaceship that is New City Hall had already opened a few blocks north, having caused a stir here when completed in 1965. But the TD Centre was much taller and dominated a skyline that was once the dominion of the Royal York Hotel, Commerce Court and various church steeples.

That it was one of the last projects by German-American architect Mies van der Rohe, a continuation of the International Style themes he made famous with his 1958 Seagram Building in New York and others that followed, added to its gravitas.

Mies’ original plan was for two towers and the banking pavilion at the corner of Bay and King Sts., but in the decades after his 1969 death, three more towers were added. Purists say the towers diluted his rather pure vision, but most people passing by or through the complex wouldn’t notice unless they looked closely, save for the final “Ernst & Young” tower that was built slightly differently and over the old Toronto Stock Exchange.

Though not an official centennial project, TD Centre shares a 50th birthday with quite a few other modern Canadian buildings from that year with their forward thinking and stark newness that still seems new today. However, like many 50-year-old humans, age is catching up, and it needs some rehab, so Cadillac Fairview, its owner, is in the midst of a multi-year, $250-million rehabilitation of all six buildings and exterior plazas.

“It takes six years to repaint the tower,” says Dora Yeoh, senior manager of tenant projects for Cadillac Fairview, glancing up at the workers dangling on rigs suspended on the side of the original and tallest tower. “Hopefully this will last 25 years.”

An architect, Yeoh has been with Cadillac Fairview for six years and before that was with B+H Architects, the firm that was contracted to work on the TD Centre and, when they were known as Bregman & Hamann, were one of the Toronto firms Mies collaborated with on the original plan and who also designed the subsequent towers on the site.

Mies famously said, “God is in the details,” and Yeoh is the guardian and caretaker of his Toronto details.

“The challenge of this complex is it’s steeped in architectural history,” she says. “Sometimes we have to remind people of that.” On a recent tour of the buildings, I asked her if, after all these years caring for these buildings, if she has Mies dreams. “Yes,” she chuckled.

The buildings are austere monoliths only from a distance, and walking around the complex, Yeoh referred to the many details that she and her team worked on, such as the tower directories. The directory and lobby in the original tower remain as they were in 1967, with each occupant listed on a backlit panel, a detail that is part of the building’s heritage designation. Yeoh pointed out that if one tenant takes up multiple floors, it leaves an awful lot of blank space on the old style directory. The other lobbies have had touch screens fitted into the original directory frames, and LED lights have been added in another building lobby. It’s about “tweaking” the original design while respecting it, Yeoh says.

Other tweaks include a lush green roof over the banking pavilion, white rather than black-grey rooftops to keep them cooler and reglazed windows, all things that have contributed to the Centre’s LEED Platinum certification, the highest environmental efficiency ranking possible.

The centre remains a unique esthetic experience to walk through today, distinct from the heterogeneous jumble of much of downtown. “The way the towers are set in urban space with all this open and green space is outstanding,” Yeoh says. “It set a precedent that very few developers have been able to match.”

Below those vast plazas is one of the oldest parts of the PATH system, too. Its interconnected and nearidentical labyrinthine corridors can confuse even longtime Torontonians and downtown dwellers with repeating chain stores and food courts, but you could always tell when you were in the TD Centre. It was calming, clean and uniform, distinct from the visual clutter and noise in much of the rest of the PATH.

However, that rigorous attention to detail changed a decade ago when the uniform white-on-black typeface Mies designed himself for the underground shops was largely scrapped, and each store allowed to install their own individual vernacular signage. Perhaps only those who care about these things will notice the Miesian bits that are gone and those that are still there, but it remains a shame: Toronto had a mall designed by Mies van der Rohe. Now it has more of the same.

The Mies legacy is much better preserved above ground at the TD Centre and seems quite safe in the hands of Yeoh and her team. The current renovation is a lesson in the importance of maintenance, being true to good design and reinvesting in the buildings we’ve already built. As so many mid-century towers and structures reach a time in their lives when they need some renewal, the attention to detail and mostly gentle tweaks the TD Centre receives should be, as it was in 1967, trendsetting.

A visual and video display commemorating the 50th Anniversary of TD Centre runs until the end of August in the lobby of 66 Wellington St. W. Shawn Micallef writes every Saturday about where and how we live in the GTA. Wander the streets with him on Twitter @shawnmicallef

TD centre remains distinct from the heterogeneous jumble of much of downtown