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Libeskind and Gehry free Toronto from the dry functionality of modernism
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.
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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.
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Toronto’s architecture has never looked better
Christopher Hume – Toronto Star
Every few decades Toronto suddenly remembers it’s a city. It happened at the end of the 19th century, when we built E.J.Lennox’s masterpiece, Old City Hall, and again in the mid-20th century, when Viljo Revell’s New City Hall, not to mention Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Toronto-Dominion Centre, both modern landmarks, arrived.
It’s happening again; only this time, we are remaking the city as a 21st-century highrise metropolis.
Given Toronto’s historic sense of insecurity, it should come as no surprise that we spend so much time agonizing over our own urbanity. Until recently, when the flight to suburbia started to slow down, even reverse, urbanity wasn’t necessarily something to which we aspired as a city.
Many distrusted the very idea. This time around, however, Toronto has embraced cityhood. Leading the way are its architects, who more than any other professional group, for better or worse, have helped bring us into the future that is now. Given the extraordinary growth rates here, perhaps that’s not surprising. Last year, there were more towers under construction in Toronto (132) than any other city on Earth; this year there are more.
Architects in this city have had a lot to keep them busy in recent years. If nothing else, the condo boom has kept hundreds of practitioners working day and night.
Then there was the Cultural Renaissance of the early 2000s that brought to Toronto some of the best known architects in the world — Frank Gehry, Will Alsop and Daniel Libeskind among them.
And so architectural culture is alive and well in Toronto. More important, local architects have evolved to the point where they see their role is not just designing structures, but building a city.
Respected real estate consultant Barry Lyon refers to last few decades as “a Golden Age of growth in Toronto.” He points to the condo boom, the handful of new office towers and schemes such as the Southcore financial district as proof. “There’s a lot more design sensitivity,” Lyon argues. “We’re using land as it were a precious resource.”
Land is a precious resource, of course, though we haven’t always treated it that way. Few understand that better than Bruce Kuwabara, a founder of Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blumberg, one of Toronto’s most respected architectural practices. KPMB’s credits include One Bedford, Festival Tower and Maple Leaf Square, all dense urban projects aware of their context.
“As the city is intensified,” Kuwabara notes, “we need to design the bases of mixed-use developments with tall towers in ways that ensure ground floor animation, lively corners, and the formation of streets and public spaces. Even if every tower were an icon for the market place — and they are not — the responsibility of the base is to integrate with the city; that’s where buildings meet and form the public domain of the city.”
Architect Peter Clewes of architectsAlliance, considered by many the pre-eminent condo designer in Toronto, echoes Kuwabara’s thoughts.
“The issue is how buildings address the street, not height, glass or size of the floor plate. But the planning culture of Toronto is too focused on built form, not the public realm. As a result we’re starting to get a lot of buildings that look the same. In Toronto, we tend to look at the street as a series of individual buildings, not a streetscape.”
“Banks do not enliven the corners of the city,” Kuwabara declares. “Large format retail stores totally change the cadence and rhythm of streets. Large windows wallpapered with printed images do not replace individual shop fronts. Toronto will never have uniform streetscapes, but it could still have vibrant streets that are intentionally designed.
“Every building implies a city and an urbanism. Density and height should be proportional to the quality of design of the bases of large mixed use projects. And the city should ensure that the materials and details included in the Site Plan Approval are the ones that actually get used.”
Clewes, who designed condos such as the Pure Spirits tower in the Distillery District. 18 Yorkville and M27 at the foot of Yonge, can point out bad examples — Liberty Village — and good — the work of Waterfront Toronto and the Bloor Yorkville Business Improvement Area, which spearheaded the recent landscape improvements on Bloor St. between Avenue Rd. and Church St.
Speaking of landscape, Toronto has quietly brought some of the most distinguished landscape architects in the world to town and given them large chunks of the city to remake. That includes Michael van Valkenburgh and James Corner from the U.S., Adriaan Gueze from Rotterdam and Claude Cormier from Quebec. They are here thanks to Waterfront Toronto, which has also signed deals with developers who have hired major international architects such as Moshe Safdie and Cesar Pelli to work in Toronto.
Local firms —RAW Design, Core Architects, Quadrangle, Montgomery Sisam, Diamond Schmitt, Hariri Pontarini — are producing urban-minded work of the highest quality. Unlike many firms, especially those founded by so-called starchitects, Toronto’s finest have avoided a signature style. This is a critical point because it demonstrates a willingness to design projects that take their cues not from some architectural ego, but from the facts at hand, in other words, the city itself, context.
Though rarely recognized, planning is more crucial to creating a great city than architecture. Architecture’s important, of course, but it’s planning that enables the total to add up to more than the sum of its parts.
Given the relatively weak planning rules in this city (and province), we must rely more on architects to fill this yawning gap. In Toronto, where for decades architects such as Jack Diamond have exhorted their fellow practitioners to incorporate “good urban manners” into their buildings, the tradition of contextualism goes back a long way.
Still, as the cliché has it, great architecture requires great clients. With few exceptions, Toronto developers have yet to measure up. That’s changing, though not as fast as the skyline.
Just ask RAW co-founder Roland Rem Coultard. “Our clients are a lot more sensitive to design,” he says. “Before, we had to push them. Now they’re pushing us. I love it.”
Like it or not, the stars are here to stay
Though local architects haven’t always been happy about it, the stars of their profession have been coming to Toronto since the beginning.
Today that means Frank Gehry, who happens to have been born and raised in this city, Will Alsop (English) and Daniel Libeskind (Polish-American), but in earlier times it was Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (German-American), I.M. Pei (Chinese-American) and Edward Durell Stone (American). Before that, there was Carrere and Hastings, a prominent New York practice that designed a number of banks in Toronto.
Their contributions vary, of course, but their presence alone indicates that this is a city that can take architecture seriously. After all, the main reason developers bring in foreign practitioners is a desire for excellence, and if not excellence, the excitement and prestige that these names can bring to a project.
The modern age of starchitecture began in earnest in 1997 when Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum opened in Bilbao, Spain. The extraordinary titanium-clad structure instantly became the most celebrated building in the world and made Gehry the most sought-after architect of his generation.
Gehry’s Toronto project, the transformation of the Art Gallery of Ontario, was a reminder of why he is a master as well as a star. By contrast, Libeskind”s remake of the Royal Ontario Museum, though dramatic, is too provocative for many. Around the corner from the AGO, Alsop”s addition to the Ontario College of Art and Design University, with its brightly coloured legs, has been one of the city’s most striking buildings since it opened in 2005.
Mies van der Rohe’s Toronto-Dominion Centre (1965−69) ranks among his masterpieces, and Pei’s luminous Commerce Court complex (1974) are architectural fixtures. Originally clad in Carrara marble, Stone’s First Canadian Place was recently reskinned in white glass. It has never looked better.
—————————————————————————————————–
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.
—————————————————————————————————–
Incoming search terms
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