William Thorsell – The Globe and Mail

On Oct. 10, Daniel Libe­skind will be in Toronto for a “top­ping off” cer­e­mony at the L Tower, a star­tling 57-storey con­do­minium at Yonge and Front streets. Six years ago, Mr. Libe­skind was in town to top off the Michael Lee-Chin Crys­tal at the Royal Ontario Museum (where I was then direc­tor). It’s becom­ing a habit.

These rad­i­cal build­ings are gen­er­at­ing debate in Canada’s pre­miere city, which is fine. But, even bet­ter, they are help­ing to lib­er­ate Toronto from the intel­lec­tual gir­dle of a spent archi­tec­tural age defined by the Inter­na­tional style. David Mirvish proves the case with his dra­matic pro­posal to cre­ate a mon­u­men­tal cul­tural and res­i­den­tial precinct at King and John streets, designed by an unbri­dled Frank Gehry.

The Inter­na­tional style in archi­tec­ture was born of the Bauhaus move­ment in Ger­many after the First World War, rooted in val­ues that sought “rad­i­cally sim­pli­fied forms … ratio­nal­ity and func­tion­al­ity, and the idea that mass pro­duc­tion was rec­on­cil­able with the indi­vid­ual artis­tic spirit.” (Wikipedia is quite good at describ­ing this, not­ing the prob­a­ble con­tra­dic­tion between “mass pro­duc­tion” and individuality.)

The core idea in the Inter­na­tional style was “less is more,” adopted and preached by its lead­ing prac­ti­tioner Mies van der Rohe, a Ger­man archi­tect who decamped to Chicago in the 1930s. It embraced ideals of effi­ciency, rea­son and util­ity. It was, in essence, an ide­ol­ogy – an ide­ol­ogy akin to Puri­tanism, hos­tile to adorn­ment, humour or “waste.” It was an expres­sion of the Machine Age, ascetic indus­tri­al­ism tri­umphant over the roman­ti­cism of art deco, which com­peted along­side the Bauhaus for 15 years after 1925. The Inter­na­tional style in archi­tec­ture ulti­mately pre­vailed in its low-cost dis­ci­pline to become, famously and infa­mously, the Archi­tec­ture of the Box.

Some boxes are bet­ter than oth­ers. Mies van der Rohe’s were the best. As in any period of archi­tec­ture, you will find won­der­ful and awful exam­ples of the genre. The Inter­na­tional style pro­duced some of the most sub­lime forms, spaces and rela­tion­ships in the his­tory of art. Among them is the two-storey bank­ing hall at Mies van der Rohe’s excel­lent TD Cen­tre in Toronto, still the most beau­ti­ful room in the city, though not the most interesting.

The Inter­na­tional style also pro­duced end­less trash in post­war Lon­don and provin­cial cities in North Amer­ica and beyond. The Miesian “box” almost invites low-cost knock­offs because its basic require­ments are so few. It is a short dis­tance from effi­cient to cheap, from “less” to mean. The Inter­na­tional style facil­i­tated dross, not uncom­mon to ide­olo­gies of any stripe, but in the length of its teeth alone, its time has come.

(The last great gasp of mod­ernism was Yoshio Taniguchi’s reit­er­a­tion of the Museum of Mod­ern Art – MOMA – in New York in 2004. How per­fect was this? The cli­max of a century’s ide­ol­ogy in mod­ernist archi­tec­ture at the epi­cen­tre of modernism.)

Where is Toronto now?

Toronto remains ded­i­cated to the Inter­na­tional style, in part because it is cheap to design and build, but out of con­vic­tion too. (The for­est of new con­dos along Lake Ontario south of Front Street is almost homo­ge­neous in its moder­nity, and thus cloy­ing.) A so-called Toronto School of mod­ernist archi­tects has arisen, much admired, bring­ing more sen­sual plea­sure to the strict func­tion­al­ity of the mod­ernist ideal. The best of them – Hariri Pon­tarini, KPMB, Shim-Sutcliffe, Archi­tects Alliance – cre­ate lovely forms and spaces in the mod­ernist style, with an eye to luxe mate­ri­als and indul­gent foils in curves and visual effects. This is mod­ernism in its matu­rity, let­ting go a bit, and it often works very well indeed. It will con­tinue to pass the test of time.

How­ever, Toronto, like Lon­don and New York, is now mov­ing beyond mod­ernism to embrace a new global spirit in archi­tec­ture. It is smartly cap­tured by Denmark’s bad-boy archi­tec­tural star, Bjarke Ingels, who riffs off Mies van der Rohe’s “Less is more” to say that “Yes is more.” (His firm’s name is BIG; their URL is, per­force, big​.dk. New era, eter­nal appeal.) He is say­ing yes to more than effi­ciency; yes to more than def­er­ence to the sta­tus quo.

The mod­ernists’ insis­tence that form fol­low func­tion was deeply informed by efficiency.

The “new archi­tec­ture” keeps func­tion at its cen­tre, but defines func­tion far beyond eco­nom­ics. Func­tion is not only effi­ciency. Func­tion is delight; func­tion is com­plex­ity; func­tion is sur­prise; func­tion is con­tem­pla­tion; func­tion is provo­ca­tion; func­tion is aggres­sion; func­tion is poetry; func­tion is mys­tery; func­tion is doubt; func­tion is love. These are the “func­tions” of art itself, embrac­ing the whole can­vas of human expe­ri­ence and aspi­ra­tion – “arti­tec­ture” unbound from the indus­trial ethic alone.

In fact, before the impor­tant archi­tec­tural events of this decade, Toronto reached beyond the Inter­na­tional style in sev­eral strik­ing moments in its his­tory. It did so when the case for sym­bolic power cried out for much more than another anony­mous box fad­ing into the back­ground. The most amaz­ing of these excep­tions is Toronto City Hall, the result of an inter­na­tional com­pe­ti­tion in 1958 that chose the little-known Finnish archi­tect Viljo Rev­ell to build two fac­ing tow­ers, oft com­pared to hands cradling some­thing – a cir­cu­lar build­ing that has come to be known as “the clam shell” – fronting an expan­sive square on Queen Street. This bla­tant excep­tion to the Inter­na­tional style came to sym­bol­ize Toronto as a place of unusual cre­ativ­ity and poten­tial (against all odds).

Sub­se­quent years saw the arrest­ing rise of the majes­tic CN Tower, Ontario Place and the Eaton Cen­tre (by Eb Zei­dler) – all out­side mod­ernism look­ing in, but deliv­er­ing potent sym­bol­ism to a city with­out a hill, whose lovely lake hid beyond a waste­land of rail yards and free­ways. Almost alone in the con­text of mod­ernism, these rare struc­tures car­ried the bur­den of giv­ing Toronto par­tic­u­lar­ity – a sense that there is, in fact, a here here. (Vic­to­rian neigh­bour­hoods pro­vided the other defin­ing grace.)

And now the dam is break­ing. Will Alsop’s “table­top” struc­ture for OCAD Uni­ver­sity broke the mould in 2004. It’s a charm­ing pop-art plaisan­terie per­fectly suited to the sub­ver­sive nature of the school. In 2007, Mr. Libeskind’s design for the ROM brought an inten­sity and poetic sen­si­bil­ity to bear on Bloor Street of almost unbear­able force (out­side and in). It parted the cur­tain on a new face of beauty, as intel­lec­tu­ally and psy­cho­log­i­cally chal­leng­ing as any­thing built in Toronto before or since – as much origami as a crystal.

Last year, in Mis­sis­sauga, two beau­ti­fully cur­va­ceous “Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe” condo tow­ers designed by Chi­nese archi­tect Yan­song Ma appeared, the result of a rare inter­na­tional com­pe­ti­tion. This month, Mr. Libeskind’s sec­ond major build­ing in Toronto reaches its height at Yonge and Front – a yearn­ing, lean­ing, inquir­ing form that draws the mind to wonder.

David Mirvish is bring­ing Frank Gehry back to Toronto just in time to do some­thing with full con­vic­tion near the end of his impor­tant career. (Mr. Gehry’s work at the Art Gallery of Ontario was sub­stan­tially lim­ited by con­text, how­ever fine that building’s spe­cific attrib­utes.) In Mr. Mirvish’s project, the jux­ta­po­si­tion of exu­ber­ant street-level forms with three proudly tall, “irra­tionally” sculpted tow­ers for hous­ing makes its neigh­bours seem old – as does the L Tower, which makes so much around it seem like the prod­uct of an ide­ol­ogy, rather than an indi­vid­ual, the prod­uct of a sys­tem rather than a soul.

—————————————————————————————————–
Con­tact the Jef­frey Team for more infor­ma­tion – 416−388−1960

Lau­rin & Natalie Jef­frey are Toronto Real­tors with Cen­tury 21 Regal Realty.
They did not write these arti­cles, they just repro­duce them here for peo­ple
who are inter­ested in Toronto real estate. They do not work for any builders.
—————————————————————————————————–

bauhaus toronto loft

Related posts:

1. Free Metropasses lat­est condo perk Under a new city pol­icy, condo devel­op­ers will have to…
2. Toronto’s archi­tec­ture has never looked bet­ter This time around, how­ever, Toronto has embraced city­hood. Lead­ing the…
3. Sut­ton Place catches up with the times Sud­denly, it seems Toronto hotels are turn­ing into con­dos and…
4. Unob­structed views on dis­play at Exhibit Exhibit’s name is a nod to the var­i­ous cul­tural hotspots…
5. Archi­tec­ture of the Times Taken as a whole, does A Guide­book to Con­tem­po­rary Architecture…