Toronto-Dominion Centre: A Modern Masterpiece

Unlike major US cities, Toronto did not get a high-rise Modern office tower until relatively late. The first of the original pair of black steel and glass towers at King and Bay Streets opened in 1968. The project was one of the last architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe designed before his death in 1969.

In 1962, the Toronto-Dominion Bank and Cemp, a development company owned by the Bronfman family, announced they together would develop a huge combined property that included TD’s celebrated 1913 Beaux-Arts headquarters.

The original architectural team consisted of Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, and Toronto firms John B. Parkin Associates and Bregman and Hamann. Bunshaft produced a design that was considered impractical and was dismissed from the project.

A revised design by John B. Parkin Associates had the banking pavilion in a sunken moat, an idea unpopular with TD chairman Allen Lambert.

Architect Phyllis Lambert (born Bronfman) knew Mies (as he’s commonly known) personally from his work on the Seagram Building in New York (the Bronfman family owned Seagram). She convinced TD and Cemp to hire him in Bunshaft’s place.

Mies’ original TD Centre consisted of the 55-storey Toronto-Dominion Bank Tower, the 44-storey Royal Trust Tower, and a one-storey banking pavilion at the corner of King and Bay Streets.

With TD Centre, as in every one of his projects, the architect paid attention to the small things: He was involved in floor plans, the selection of materials for the interior — even the design of furniture. 

At a larger scale, Mies considered the placement of buildings on the site. The 55-storey Toronto-Dominion Bank Tower, the largest of the original pair of towers, was situated so it directly faced the Toronto Star Building across the street without overshadowing it.

The double-height ground floors of the towers, walled in glass, make the buildings appear to hover weightless just off the ground while the bank pavilion at the corner of King and Bay Streets is situated by itself, which in the architectural language of Mies and other Modernists signifies special function.

TD Centre was designated a heritage building under the Ontario Heritage Act in 2003 and the bank has retained many of Mies’ original design choices throughout.

The 54th floor, which is currently split between Canoe restaurant on the south side and TD’s boardroom on the north, appears almost exactly as it did in 1968 when the building opened.

It’s filled with countless small details that make it special and give the floor an air of prestige and importance.

In the plan above, which was made in the 1960s and is oriented with north at the bottom, the space marked “1” is the reception area where people entering the executive suite would be greeted and seated. 

The area marked “2” is the boardroom and “4” is chairman Allen Lambert’s reception area. (The small room labelled “3” was Lambert’s office, and the rooms with a “5” were meeting spaces).

This tour of the 54th floor executive suite will go from the reception area, through the boardroom, to the Lambert room on the east side of the building.

Guests were greeted by an uninterrupted view out the north window. Before construction of other downtown skyscrapers, the view would have extended to the horizon.

In this space are several original Barcelona chairs. Designed by Mies and German Modernist designer Lilly Reich, today the chairs are considered Modern design classics.

The chairs were designed for the German pavilion at the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona, Spain. Knowing King Alfonso XIII would visit the pavilion during the exposition, Mies said that he designed a chair for a king.

The floor is made from a single piece of travertine marble imported from Italy. Project architect Peter Carter visited the quarry in Tivoli to address Mies’ concerns that the marble slabs all be a perfect match.

Appropriate pieces were found, brought to Toronto, and cut into pieces here. They were then laid out in a warehouse and reassembled while Carter observed from the top of a ladder. The jigsaw was then recreated on the 54th floor.

As a result, natural calcite veins in the stone run the full 45-metre length of the 54th floor. Mies always used travertine with the grain running horizontally (whether on a wall or on the floor) because “that is the way it grows”, he said.

The same travertine marble also lines the floors and walls of the lobby.

The reception area is now used to display works from TD’s art collection.

It’s made from five sections of solid English brown oak sourced from the Broadlands estate in Hampshire, England. The estate is the home of the Mountbatten family and both Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip and Charles and Diana honeymooned there.

The pieces were so large and unwieldy that they had to be craned into the 54th floor through the windows before the glass was installed. In total, the table is 36 feet (11 metres) long.

The same English brown oak was used for the wall panels throughout the 54th floor and there are numerous hidden cupboards and storage areas. Some panels are also moveable so the boardroom can be sealed, if necessary, should confidential matters be discussed.

A secret button under the boardroom table sounds a bell in another part of the floor to summon assistance.

Around the boardroom table are 32 examples of another chair designed by Mies and Reich. The Brno chair was conceived for the bedroom of the famous Tugendhat House in Brno, which is now in the Czech Republic. Mies and Reich designed the house and its furniture together. The home is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Despite the design being more than 30 years old when TD Centre was built (and now close to 90 years old), the chairs still look futuristic.

In 1968, when the tower was completed, Lambert’s sky-high office would have had uninterrupted panoramic views. (Despite having no neighbours that high up, the room was fitted with curtains.)

This space has changed most of all the rooms in the executive suite. Lambert moved his office to a lower floor about a year after TD Centre opened because he found the elevator ride too long.

The space remained reserved for his use, however, and he held meetings here from time to time. Today, it’s used as a meeting space.

Construction of TD Centre sparked an architectural battle among Canada’s big banks. The Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, headquartered on the opposite side of Bay Street, acted first, commissioning architect I. M. Pei to design the silver International-style Commerce Court West. When it opened in 1972, it was 26 feet taller than the Toronto-Dominion Bank Tower.

The Bank of Montreal’s First Canadian Place, designed by Edward Durrell Stone, followed in 1975. It overshadowed both TD Centre and Commerce Court West, and was Canada’s tallest skyscraper for more than four decades.

The last of the big banks to build a downtown Toronto skyscraper was Scotiabank, which completed the terracotta-colour Scotia Plaza in 1988.

Mies strongly encouraged the bank to invest in important international artists. However, chairman Allen Lambert decided that the bank would instead only collect work by Canadian artists.

Dr. Martin Baldwin, a former curator and director of the Art Gallery of Ontario, was retained as a consultant, and his recommendations became the foundation of TD’s extensive art collection, which now includes works such Composition by Jean-Paul Riopelle, Playing Around with A Gong by Claude Toussignant and Long Voyage vers La Nuit by Jean Paul Lemieux.

At the same time, TD began assembling Inuit sculptural works that would eventually become the bank’s Centennial gift to Canada. The collection toured the country in 1967 before being installed on the 55th floor observation gallery, which closed in the 1970s.

Today, the TD Gallery of Indigenous Art, which showcases a broad range of  contemporary Indigenous art, is located in the lobby of 66 Wellington Street. The gallery aims to amplify underrepresented and diverse voices in the arts through the TD Ready Commitment.

The Inuit Art collection assembled for the Centennial is on display on the upper mezzanine.

The 54th floor executive suite features a rotating selection of contemporary works by artists in the bank’s collection. Pieces by Vanessa Maltese and Chih-Chien Wang are currently on display.