Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe died in 1969, shortly after the TD Centre was officially opened. But he is alive and well and living in Toronto.
He is alive when Wayne Cochrane, a florist from the north end of the city, carries 15 glass bowls filled with yellow daisies from his truck into the Toronto-Dominion Banking Pavilion, where they are set on the tellers' counters and in the manager's office. He does this every Sunday afternoon.
According to specifications written by Mies, the daisies are arranged to represent domes -- as Cochrane explains, because "the dome style softens the square lines of the columns." To create the domes, Cochrane places the tallest flowers, measuring 12½ inches (32 centimetres) at the centre of the bouquet, while the shorter, 10½-inch (27-centimetre) stems are arranged around the bowl's perimeter.
Knowing this about Cochrane -- the mathematical rigour that produces shimmering, bright domes of colour for the banking pavilion -- is to know something important about what motivated Mies: "One must consider all aspects of a building," said Mies, who was the last director of the Bauhaus before leaving Germany for the United States in 1937. "True education is concerned not only with practical goals but with values," he said in his inaugural address as Director of Architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology. "By our goals we are bound to the specific structure of our epoch. Our values, on the other hand, are rooted in the spiritual nature of man."
Two major retrospectives of the great modern master have opened this summer at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. There are scale models and newly commissioned photographs of some of Mies's great works -- the Farnsworth House (1950), the Seagram Building (1958; with Philip Johnson) and the Illinois Institute of Technology (1940-1956) -- and drawings of his European work that have never been shown in the United States.
There are paintings, sculptures and a newly discovered series of sketches, lightly drawn by Mies in cinematic sequence on 6-by-8-inch (15-by-20-centimetre) Apex notepaper. The Whitney's catalogue for Mies in America is a seminal, 800-page document edited and co-authored by exhibition organizer Phyllis Lambert.
There is all of this in New York, the kind of documentation and intellectual argument that moves us closer to an understanding of the formidable vision of Mies. But somehow, inexplicably, the story of the yellow daisies at the Toronto-Dominion Centre went missing.
None of which would matter without an understanding of the quality of space at the TD, and the kind of familial devotion it has inspired. Mies designed the TD Centre in the early 1960s to dominate the heart of Canada's financial district. It is one of his most important masterworks in North America, and his most inspired contribution to this country, a lyrical piece of urbanism compared with his firm, more formulaic, mixed-used development, Westmount Square (1968), and Nun's Island Esso gas station (1970), both in Montreal.
The TD Centre was originally designed as an urban assemblage of three buildings: the 56-storey Toronto-Dominion Tower, the 46-storey Royal Trust Tower and the single-story, clear-span Toronto Dominion Banking Pavilion.
Like Mies's skeletal towers in Chicago and New York, the steel-and-glass towers in Toronto rise dramatically out of the ground like sheer, black cliffs. The banking pavilion, on the other hand, carries the richly sensual materials of Mies's more intimate work. The centre is both visceral and cerebral; it embraces the mechanization of Fordism as much as it does the building art. Ultimately, Mies was after something spiritual, an aspiration that occasionally resonates for the people working at the TD Centre.
Spirituality doesn't necessarily exist, for instance, at another of Mies's urban ensembles -- the Federal Center in downtown Chicago (1959-1974) -- which lacks the quality of space and the dramatic shifts in scale that Toronto boasts. Chicago's complex occupies a site that is split by a street, so its urbanism looks slightly pinched.
The approach to the Toronto-Dominion Centre, to the south, requires the ceremony of ascending a pair of stairs or, to the north, moving directly onto the St. John's grey granite plaza that merges seamlessly with the city sidewalk. When bank manager Mary Hatch takes the elevator from the concourse into the pavilion, this is what she feels: "Probably because the building is so tall -- it's only one storey, but it's closer to three storeys and your eyes are immediately drawn upwards -- I feel lifted."
Mies designed the TD Centre as a cinematic unfolding of space and framed stills. In this way, Mies is the director. Everybody else is an actor. "I feel good that I'm continuing a tradition that comes from the beginning," says Cochrane. This is the kind of feeling that has grown up among the actors.
It has grown up in spite of the rough beginnings, when individual shop owners were cleared from the downtown in order to make way for the 5½-acre (2.2-hectare) private development. Back then, John Sewell condemned the corporatization of public space in Toronto, and made his point by standing on the TD Plaza and distributing blank sheets of paper, before being ushered away by security officers.
Two of its most public venues -- a cinema in the underground concourse, and the observation deck on the 55th floor of the TD Tower -- have been closed. At the summit, hostesses (that's what they were called) would tell visitors all about the development and direct them to telescopes near the building's glass walls. Janice Cooper has been an audit-and-security officer for 27 years at the TD Centre branch; she can remember seeing The Other Side of the Mountain in 1975 at the cinema. "I feel like I'm part of the furniture," she says.
Which is saying a lot. Mies chose to furnish the pavilion with new production lines of the Barcelona chair originally designed for the King and Queen of Spain. The pavilion also boasts the Brno chair, originally designed by Mies for the Tugendhat House at Brno, Czechoslovakia (1930), a spare work of modernism designed as an open, richly detailed space.
Cooper has seen to the care of the chairs over the years, sending them out on occasion to local, family-run upholsteries when the black leather has become worn or cracked. She speaks easily about these acclaimed works of modern furniture design. "I call them by their names but not everybody does," she says frankly. "The Barcelona chairs are very low but the Brno chairs are quite comfortable."
Much has been written and debated in academic quarters about Mies, the cold, calculated mathematician; about his silent, cerebral nature. In the Mies in America catalogue, Harvard academic K. Michael Hays argues against the damning critiques of Mies for architecture that is totalizing and numbingly reiterative, pointing instead to the potential for life to unfold in Miesian space.
Speaking from the 46th floor of the TD Tower, Tim Murphy, a partner with the law firm McCarthy Tetrault, would agree and disagree with Hays. "From the street-level perspective, the thing that stands out the most is the cleanliness of the lines. You have the tall lines of the tower, the banks of the elevators inside, and you can see the same design running through the buildings. But you feel the emptiness of the space the longer you are here. It's clean. It's simple. The flip side is that it's clean and simple."
Clean and simple is often complex to maintain, or at least expensive. Several years ago, the single-pane glass of the towers would occasionally frost up in the cold winter months. The TD Centre's owner, Cadillac Fairview, upgraded the mechanicals and improved air flow. Solar film was placed on the interior of the windows to deflect some of the sun's heat.
New to the Miesian set, the actor can feel disoriented by the order and logic expressed so rigorously by the director. "For some time I felt like a visitor," says Mary Hatch, manager of the TD Banking Pavilion. But Mies designed the manager's office as one of the only enclosed spaces within the open pavilion. Its walls are constructed of English brown oak specified by Mies from one of Lord Mountbatten's estates. The walls are covered in unfilled Roman travertine with its grain running horizontally. The mechanical ducts in the pavilion are covered in a deep green Tinos marble, as are the tellers' counters.
There is a remarkable attention to detail, the product of Mies's intention and the design drawings of his office colleagues Gene Summers and Peter Carter, who worked on the project in collaboration with the Toronto firms John B. Parkin Associates and Bregman & Hamann. Every screw in the building is hand-torqued so that the horizontal slot line faces the same direction. Every light switch -- finished in buffed stainless steel -- is recessed slightly to make for a seamless wall. There are double reveals that make elegant pleats of wall corners on the office floors in the towers. There is even magic in the garbage receptacles on the exterior plaza; each cylinder is cut from a single flange of granite.
In other branch offices, the manager would have clear sightlines to her tellers and customers. At the banking pavilion, Hatch occupies a wooden cocoon -- impractical in some respects, but it is hard to argue with the space. Her clients, she says, love it because it's an inner sanctum.
"I could look at the wood and the way it is matched for hours," says Hatch. "For somebody who was so minimalist, there's incredible detail."
Travertine has been laid up on the walls of the pavilion and throughout the tower lobbies. Unfilled, it exposes an intricate texture of slits and fossilized wrinkles that have been made over time.
Occasionally, the small gaps are difficult to resist for gum chewers. Eddie Botelho has been one of the pavilion's cleaners -- known as porters -- for almost 15 years. He has dusted the brown oak and cleaned the granite floors. But he has also pried gum from the travertine.
"They have no respect," he says, narrowing his eyes, deftly dividing the world into those who belong to Mies's family and those who don't -- at least not yet. lrochon@globeandmail.ca