ARCHITECTURE

Goethe-Institut

100 University Avenue

2019 was the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus founding in Dessau, a small city south of Berlin. Though the art and design school was only open until 1933 and had less than 500 graduates and only 1250 students in total, its influence and legacy reached far beyond Germany and can be found around the world, even here in Toronto, and both modernism and urbanism wouldn’t be the same today without the Bauhaus.

In 1922 the Bauhaus’s first director, architect Walter Gropius, submitted a design for the Chicago Tribune tower along with Adolf Meyer. Though they did not win the international competition, it’s uncanny how their design looks like so many condos and office towers built in the last 20 years, all variations on the rectangular boxes, glass walls and symmetrical balconies that jut out of various corners. Its progressive art and design ethos was that forward thinking. Let’s go for a walk and find more Bauhaus influences nearby.

St. Andrews Church / Roy Thomson Hall

73 Simcoe Street

Take a look at St. Andrew’s Church on the corner. It was built in 1876 and designed by William George Storm, the architect also behind University and Victoria Colleges at the University of Toronto and the iron fence nearby at Osgoode Hall. Looking at the façade it’s obvious, with its sculptural elements, that tradespeople and artisans were an important part of the building process. 

Though it was a modernist movement, the Bauhaus’s first director, Walter Gropius, wrote a manifesto in 1919 stating “The ultimate goal of all art is the building,” putting an image of a cathedral on the cover. It was a symbol of medieval craft and a statement that fine arts were indispensable to architecture. Gropius wanted to erase the artificial barrier between artists and craftspeople, feeling creativity and modern manufacturing were drifting apart. To this end, Avant Garde artists were enlisted to stimulate the creative process at the Bauhaus.

There was a tension here though. Bauhaus is known for its clean style with no ornamentation; a reaction to the mess of World War I and the symbols of royalty, nobility and the like that led to it. Looking at Roy Thomson Hall across the street, it’s a building that embodies the cleaner lines and transparency of the Bauhaus, but also a civic ethos that saw value in the arts. The City of Dessau financed the building of the Bauhaus school while Roy Thomson is city-owned and local business people raised funds for its construction in a civic effort.

Enwave (Mechanical Building)

123 Simcoe Street

The Bauhaus influence is often subtle. This Enwave mechanical building is the kind of utilitarian structure found in lots of big and small cities, but the works are often hidden. With this one there’s a nod to transparency with the translucent windows, of letting the public see or know what’s within and understand it’s indeed a mechanical building rather than trying to hide that. In Toronto, so-called “hydro houses” can be found in neighbourhoods across the city, a mid-century effort to make transformer stations blend in with the local architecture. Instead, this is a more honest building with no illusions.

At the Bauhaus School they placed a functional radiator on a stairway landing where, if it were a house, a painting or mural might go. They let a radiator be a radiator and elevated it to an object to be admired in a prominent place. Much of what makes the city work is hidden underground, so here the Bauhaus ethos is at work.

Shangri-La Hotel

188 University Avenue

The Shangri La building here is fairly typical of the kind of buildings that have gone up in Toronto over the last few decades. It embraces the idea of pre-fabricated industrial construction of housing, realized by repetition in each building of standard component parts. Go into any condo unit and you’re likely to see the same heat and air conditioning panel, the same granite countertops. In theory the infinite variations on this standardization is cheaper to produce, meaning lower rent or purchase price to occupy, even if a bit monotonous at times.

Wrapping around the front façade is “Peace Pigeons,” a sculpture by artist Zhang Huan, who says he wants “mankind and nature to live in harmony”. The ornament on the standardized form here can be seen as the integration of artist and builder, a Bauhaus ideal, though rarely are artists involved in the design phase of a building in Toronto; usually they are brought on once that stage is completed. In Toronto many of these works of art are funded by what’s known as “Section 37” of the Ontario Planning Act that allows a builder to barter for more height or density by offering some public amenity, often in the form of a piece of public art. Perhaps not exactly the way the Bauhaus intended the integration to happen, but it’s how it works here.

Sir Adam Beck Statue

250 University Avenue

Here in the middle of University Avenue is the monument to Sir Adam Beck, the German-Canadian politician and early advocate for public hydro-electricity in Ontario. If you look around the base of the monument, the locations of Ontario’s hydro-electric generating stations are listed. The sculpture was designed by German-Canadian sculptor Emanual Hahn, perhaps most famous for his Bluenose sculpture on the 10-cent coin.

Beck has a great view of the Opera House on the east side of the street. When lit from within at night it has a lantern effect, and the curtain glass wall here is an echo of the glass wall on the Bauhaus building in Dessau supported by narrow steel mullions. Its structure is exposed and transparent, as we can see the balconies and staircases within.

We’re also standing atop the Osgoode TTC station -- note the signs on each corner. Bauhaus member Herbert Bayer created the Universal typeface and visual identity for the school, which today we would call the “brand”. In the same spirit, the TTC commissioned the Toronto Subway typeface for the opening of the first stretch of the Yonge line in 1954, creating a uniform look along the line. Use of the type was neglected by the TTC in intervening decades but it has been revived in recent years.

Toronto City Hall

100 Queen Street West

Here in Nathan Phillips Square at the base of the middle Freedom Arch closest to Queen Street is Toronto’s very own chunk of the Berlin Wall. This piece of the wall was purchased by Marcus Hess, an engineer from Kitchener, and flown over by the German Consulate in 1991, one of many pieces of the wall that made their way around the world.

City Hall itself was opened in 1965 and designed by Finnish architect Viljo Revell. It carried on Bauhaus traditions as craftwork is quite evident in its construction. Get up close to it and look at the details, especially the fine stone grain of the towers, the tile work and door handles. It’s an expressionistic building, with modern construction techniques that demanded new forms, like the weightless-seeming concrete in these arches and the council chamber “clamshell”. Like the Bauhaus school’s design ethos itself with three distinct wings, City Hall has a separation of uses connected by bridges, stairwells and in between places where people can meet.

Abstraction was also important to the Bauhaus, as it existed in a tense political environment and indirect ways were needed to make a statement. The Archer sculpture by Henry Moore in the square closer to City Hall continues the tradition of abstraction, and existed in its own tense political climate as its cost became an issue when City Hall opened, and it was paid for by private donation.

Cloud Gardens

14 Temperance Street

Here in Cloud Gardens is the Monument to Construction Workers on the east wall by the greenhouse. It’s an explicit celebration of craft and trade workers that would make the Bauhaus proud. Artist Margaret Priest collaborated with Baird/Sampson Architects and twenty-seven Ontario trade unions on this eighty-five-foot-long structural steel grid with insert panels. Each trade union fabricated a panel representative of their specific materials and expertise, based on Priest’s original drawings. For example, Copper Shingles evokes roofing, pipes for pipefitters, concrete rebar, clusters of wire, and so on.

Priest said of her work here, “This monument is dedicated to the many skilled men and women who, drawing upon generations of knowledge and tradition, have wielded the materials of the built world, forming them expertly according to the needs of each finished building.”

The greenhouse, when open, is also a lovely brief refuge, especially in the winter.

TD Centre

55 King Street West

The most direct Bauhaus connection in Toronto is the TD Centre, as it was designed by the third and last director of the school, architect Mies van der Rohe. He guided the school in its final years, trying to depoliticize it, but was ultimately driven to North America by Nazi politics, where he became arguably the most successful Bauhaus architect and one of the most famous architects in the world. 

The TD Centre was one of his last projects before his death in 1969 and is typical of the International Style he pioneered with clean and angular lines. True to the Bauhaus ethos, this style rejected nationalistic symbols and ornament, yet if you walk up to one of the buildings here you’ll see visible I-beams, a Mies trademark and celebration of the building structure.

Below ground are a network of tunnels that connect to adjacent buildings, part of Toronto’s PATH system of shops and restaurants. The TD Centre’s section of the PATH was always unique, designed almost mausoleum-like, clean and orderly, an echo of that Bauhaus response to World War I. Mies also designed a uniform white-on-black typeface for every commercial space, so there was a uniformity, though the building owner allowed vernacular signage to be installed by each store, so there is very little of that left today.

Commerce Court (CIBC Tower)

199 Bay Street

We’re here at Commerce Court, a classic Toronto combination of old and new architecture working together. Flush along King Street is Commerce Court North, an ornate 1931 building that was said to have been the tallest building in the British Empire for a few decades. Closer to the corner is the glass and steel tower known as Commerce Court West. Completed in 1972, it, like the TD Centre across the street, is in the International Style. Designed by architect I.M. Pei, perhaps most famous for his glass pyramids that were added to the Louvre in Paris, it also has direct Bauhaus connections.

Pei was trained at the Harvard Graduate School of Design where he met and worked with Bauhaus architects Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer. Harvard itself also played host to the first Bauhaus exhibition in the United States in 1930 and went on to be a major centre of all things Bauhaus in America, so Pei was steeped in its ideals.

As of 2021, Commerce Court is set to change yet again as the shorter south building, behind Pei’s glass tower, is set to be razed and a new tower put in its place. The city is never static.

Berczy Park

35 Wellington Street East

You’re standing in Berczy Park, named after early Toronto pioneer William Berczy, a German immigrant in the 18th century. Converted from a parking lot to a park decades ago, this space underwent a major redesign beginning in 2015 by landscape architect Claude Cormier. His dog fountain became an instant favourite. Find the lone cat among the dogs and follow its gaze to find a subtle design surprise.

The park has a thoughtful colour design, a departure from the grey tones Toronto is usually known for. Colour was a foundation course for Bauhaus students and Avant Garde artists like Kandinsky and Klee were brought in to teach colour. The Bauhaus’s Gertrud Brunow developed a colour wheel, part of her Harmonization Theory. In the early 20th century Grunow, a musician, developed her own methods for teaching music. At the Bauhaus she taught the equitable and harmonious use of all the senses in design. The Bauhaus building itself used colour by highlighting load-bearing and non-load-bearing elements with colour, as well as using colour-coded floors to help navigation.