Toronto-Dominion Centre: The Last Sentence in Mies's Grammar

The Toronto-Dominion Centre fills the blocks between King and Wellington, Bay and York. From its plaza the buildings read as a single design. Black steel. Dark glass. A flat granite plaza underfoot, with lawns and trees. Tall towers set at right angles to one another, and a single low glass banking pavilion between them. This is the last of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's major commissions, and it set the pattern for the financial district around it.

How Mies came to Toronto

The Toronto-Dominion Bank was formed in 1955 by a merger. Its chairman, Allen Lambert, worked with the real estate company Fairview Corporation to assemble the site, a block of 3.35 hectares, according to The Cultural Landscape Foundation. Mies was brought in as the designer, with the Canadian firms John B. Parkin Associates and Bregman and Hamann as the architects who carried the work through. Phyllis Lambert, who had championed Mies for the Seagram Building in New York, is credited with recommending him. (She and Allen Lambert were not related.)

The first tower, the TD Bank Tower, was finished in 1967, in time for Canada's Centennial, and two more buildings followed by 1969: the low Banking Pavilion and a second, shorter tower. Mies died in 1969. Later towers were added to the complex in the decades after.

A short list of parts

The building's grammar is easy to read once you know to look for it. There are very few parts, and each one repeats:

• Black steel on the outside, giving the towers a regular, unbroken grid of vertical lines from the plaza to the roof.
• Dark glass, set in that grid, with no ornament, no setbacks and no historical decoration.
• A granite plaza, laid in a rectilinear grid of pavers, with trees and lawn placed asymmetrically so the flat ground contrasts with the tall towers.
• The pavilion, a single low glass box at ground level, the one part of the design built at a person's scale.

The company name, where it appears, is kept low, near the ground. The towers announce themselves by their proportions and their colour, not by signs.

Once it stood, every bank tower that followed in the district had to answer it, whether by copying its dark grid or by breaking from it, as the gold glass of Royal Bank Plaza does across Bay Street.

What lies under the plaza

The plaza is also a roof. The Cultural Landscape Foundation notes that it sits on top of a parking garage and a retail concourse. The TD Centre did not invent Toronto's tunnels: the City dates the first underground link to 1900, when the T. Eaton Company joined its stores. But towers like this one, built with shops underneath, became the pieces of the network now called the PATH, which the City says spans more than 30 kilometres and connects more than 75 buildings. For that story, read Two Downtowns, Stacked.

Protected

The site was designated under the Ontario Heritage Act in 2003. In 2004 the courtyard was renamed Oscar Peterson Square, after the Canadian jazz pianist. In 2012 the landscape firm Janet Rosenberg and Studio replanted the plaza.

How this connects to a walk

No Roamer tour stops at the TD Centre. It stands a few minutes' walk north of Union Station, where the CN Tower and the Waterfront walk begins, so it is easy to see before you set off south toward the CN Tower and the lake. The walk itself is nine stops over about two and a half kilometres, about 85 minutes at an easy pace.