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TORONTO - The granite benches at the Toronto-Dominion Centre have been trashed. Not by roaming bands of graffiti artists or ripper skateboarders, but as part of a larger "courtyard improvement project" undertaken by the suits at Cadillac Fairview, the owners of the TD Centre.
The surgical incisions, as wide as a man's hand and deep enough to reveal a lighter tone of granite, have been made at regular intervals around the edge of each slab bench. Works that belonged to an epic story of 1960s minimalism in the downtown have suffered a slam - a bad, unexpected fall from grace. I'd rather see the disfigured benches removed from the plaza than witness the body blow.
The Toronto-Dominion Centre, conceived in the mid-1960s, was designed by the legendary modernist Mies van der Rohe with Toronto's John B. Parkin Associates and Bregman + Hamann as two mountains and one banking shed of serious, corporate darkness surrounded by hard plazas and oases of greenery.
The benches once lined the flamed-granite plaza as singular, reliable places to sit or lie down during the lunch hour. The calculated defacement is an attempt by the landlord to forever prevent the grinding, fakies and fat tricks of skateboarders who occasionally invade the privately owned plaza.
The landlord considers the incisions to be part of a necessary restoration more appropriate to the mess of people who increasingly want in on some downtown action. "We're restoring our benches, rather than replacing them," says Steven Sorensen, general manager of the Toronto-Dominion Centre.
"The cuts were made to discourage skateboarding activity, which plagues all of downtown Toronto. Skateboarding activity is a bit of a hazard to our tenants."
Perhaps the landlord is a hazard to itself. When you mess with the centre, you mess with the unforgiving rigour of the Miesian aesthetic. And the cerebral legacy.
Toronto-Dominion Centre (1964 - 1971) was designed by the legendary modernist Mies van der Rohe with Toronto's John B. Parkin Associates and Bregman & Hamann (B + H) as two mountains and one banking shed of serious, corporate darkness surrounded by hard plazas and oases of greenery.
When you mess with the centre, you mess with the unforgiving rigour of the Miesian aesthetic. And the legacy.
It has hardly been an intervention worth the time and money. Here's the irony: Despite the damage inflicted on the body of the benches, the skateboarders are still showing up at the TD Centre.
The three boys I saw there during one recent Sunday afternoon had set up a small launch ramp, the better to catch some air and ride across the centre of the benches. The ride was more dangerous than before - what with the chinks cut out of the edges - but perhaps a little more exhilarating.
One of the kids, who looked about 10, had to regularly abort his ride, but he stood patiently at the side, observing the tricks of the older, more experienced boys. It looked to me like an instructive bit of mentorship, though (I know) skateboarding can grind away any hard surface lip and leave tracks of rubber on the pavings. But it seems a whole lot healthier than a boy stuck inside, growing addicted to his Xbox.
There is much that is laudable about the current TD project. The roof of the underground concourse is being waterproofed and the badly cracked granite stones on the plaza, worn out by snow plows and a crush of humanity since the 1960s, are being painstakingly replaced. Janet Rosenberg + Associates, whose landscape firm is consulting on the project along with B + H Architects, has been gently substituting the erstwhile landscape of pastels with impatiens and begonias in a bold palette of reds, oranges and yellows: colours specified by Mies van der Rohe when he was a design titan to corporate giants in North America. The great green lawns continue to be resodded every year - at some expense - to provide one of the great pleasures of the downtown.
Remember, as the TD Centre website proclaims, that the plazas were designed as a place for people to gather. "Mies gave the Toronto-Dominion Centre a clear and deliberate design, graceful and powerful, black and timeless," it reads. "A design that welcomed people and elevated the city."
But, let's be specific. "People" does not include young, athletic boys on a hunt. Not for moose or deer, but for anything hard and horizontal on which to catch some air. Is that bad?
Mr. Sorensen contends that "this is a business environment first and foremost and the plaza caters first to our tenants. … There are specific skateboard parks that are better suited to that activity."
But there really aren't many. The skateboard park planned to run alongside Lake Shore Boulevard in Toronto's east end has been delayed for years despite a "groundbreaking ceremony" in the spring. Other gathering zones, such as the one located a long bike ride through the forest past Pottery Road, are isolated and potentially dangerous. Rather than integrate skateboarding delights directly into new parks, designers attach nasty steel braces along benches and ramps to ward off the apparent menace. The unspoken gospel is that skateboarding kids, possibly more than the homeless, deserve to be marginalized.
If that doesn't bother you, then consider the powerful metaphors those skateboarders can send out to the currently distressed corporate world. Consider a move called "the bail." Boarders intentionally fall to avoid serious injury. The rippers manage a bail with deftness and grace.
All the financial types who labour at the TD Centre should gather around the granite benches and watch the boarders. And learn how to think before the ground rises up and smacks them in the face.