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Design

An Old Mies For a New Toronto

How Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the final director of the Bauhaus school, sparked an architectural arms race in downtown Toronto among Canada’s major banks.
Mies’s towers emerged like gigantic obsidian monoliths over the city's modest landscape, dwarfing it all. Today, TD Centre merely peeps out from a crowd of dozens of taller and bigger towers.
Mies’s towers emerged like gigantic obsidian monoliths over the city's modest landscape, dwarfing it all. Today, TD Centre merely peeps out from a crowd of dozens of taller and bigger towers.City of Toronto Archives
By
Chris Bateman

No single development has transformed Toronto’s skyline quite like the Toronto-Dominion Centre.

The arrival of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s twin office towers in the late 1960s signaled a dramatic and permanent change in the city’s prevailing architectural style: For the first time, a major commercial development took over almost an entire city block and a high-rise of steel and glass became the city’s tallest building.