When the Toronto skyline got its jolt of modernism

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At the outset of the 1960s, Toronto's skyline was positively Buffalo-esque. While marked by majestic old structures like the Royal York Hotel and the Canadian Bank of Commerce Building, approaching the city by boat, one would have also noticed a preponderance what we would now consider low-rise buildings and more than one church steeple that had yet to be obscured by the intense development of the city's downtown core that was about to get underway.

In more ways than one, this process started with the rise of the first and tallest of the buildings that would eventually compose the Mies van der Rohe-designed TD Centre. At 56-storeys, it's monolithic black steel body rose above the tired skyline with a modernist minimalism that was almost completely foreign at the time.

The future may have arrived in Toronto a couple of years earlier with the construction of new City Hall, but from the standpoint of the skyline, the importance of the TD Centre would only be rivalled by that of the CN Tower, which was completed nine years later and has remained the city's most iconic structure to this day.

Although it may not strike the casual observer in such a way today, Mies' masterpiece â composed of two towers and the banking pavilion at King and Bay streets â was about as bold as Toronto architecture got. The stark black aesthetics, its metal construction, and the expansive site upon which it was built (the complex encompasses four standard city blocks) demonstrated a type of vision that Toronto was unaccustomed to heading into the 1960s. Thank you Allen and Phyllis Lambert.

The city has since grown around Mies' towers, lessening their dramatic mark on the skyline, but they nevertheless remain some of Toronto's most elegant buildings.

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