For Toronto fans of high-style architectural modernism, the vast penthouse atop 130 Bloor St. West is sacred ground. A public outcry went up last year, from city politicians, architects and others, when rumour had it that the owners of the building were making ready to subdivide the 10,000-square-foot suite into so many mean little apartments.
This act of desecration did not happen, and it's not going to. Though the rest of the little tower at 130 Bloor will shortly undergo a massive makeover by Quadrangle Architects -- of which more presently --the apartment is being marketed exactly as is, including its 45-year-old kitchen appliances, the original oak panelling and the patina of nearly a half-century of living and entertaining by late Toronto businessman Noah Torno and his wife, Rose. (The 4,000-foot terrace, currently home to some exhausted looking pine trees, will be curtailed by the impending renovation.)
Anyone with the millions of dollars necessary to buy this apartment will have millions more to furnish it and update the circa-1960 wiring and fixtures and fittings. He or she also will be under some pressure from the city, which designated the apartment a heritage property last year, to maintain its modernist character.
I hope every potential buyer keenly feels that public persuasion. The Torno suite (which now serves as the sales centre for itself and other future condominiums in the building) is a notable instance of mid-century American modernist ideas put to work in a luxurious residential setting. The plain, elegant staircase connecting the two floors of the apartment floats upward from a stern, skylit entry hall floored and walled with travertine, the light beige stone that was always power-style modernism's favourite indicator of swankiness. The 11-foot planes of floor-to-ceiling glass on the exterior walls dramatically light the stately main-floor rooms, which are trimmed in handsomely cut and finished oak.
If architecture can have gender, this apartment is masculine in a mid-century way -- not suave like Cary Grant, but sturdy and square-shouldered, like the tabloid magnate played by Raymond Massey in The Fountainhead. The next owner of the Torno apartment will find the place very resistant to frills and prettification, but more amenable to decor that plays off the suite's right angles, calm and rational north lighting, and rigid geometry.
But who created this large chunk of real-guy architecture on top of 130 Bloor West? In almost every recent press report, the name of U.S. celebrity architect Philip Johnson turns up. There is a clutch of Toronto aficionados firmly convinced that Mr. Johnson did the flat. Not so, says Brian Curtner, principal in Quadrangle Architects and lead designer on the building's revamp. A search of the Johnson papers, Mr. Curtner told me, turned up not a trace of architectural involvement -- not a note, not a sketch or drawing -- and only a single scrap of evidence that Mr. Johnson and Mr. Torno ever met. (It would be odd if they had never met. Mr. Torno's wife was a close relation of architect and philanthropist Phyllis Bronfman Lambert, who knew and worked with Mr. Johnson and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in New York.)
I hope to know some day who designed the apartment, though I would not be sorry if it turned out to be someone other than Mr. Johnson. He was the Paris Hilton of American architecture: rich, vain, good at sniffing out the zeitgeist, notably short on hard talent. The Torno apartment is not brilliant or sparklingly imaginative, but it is solidly done and entirely responsible -- like other things executed over the years by the Toronto firm Bregman + Hamann, which put up 130 Bloor West in 1960.
As for the rest of the building, Quadrangle intends a strong revision and extension upward. The ground floor will be devoted (as it is now) to deluxe retail (Cartier, Gucci and so on), though, if Toronto is fortunate, the ugly existing street-level façade will be swept away and replaced by something that gives this dowdy stretch of Bloor a lift.
Floors two to 10 are now offices, and will remain so. Floors 11 and 12 will be converted from office space to large condominiums (4,200 to 4,500 square feet). The Torno flat comes next, on 13 and 14. On top of all this, Mr. Curtner and his team will add six new high-ceilinged storeys, with only one unit (5,500 to 6,000 square feet) on each floor.
Each of the new apartments, which are expected to sell at about $1,000 a foot, promises to be a faithful translation of the Torno suite's high modernism into a contemporary idiom: not as grand as the original, surely, but quite as alert to the enduring beauties of modern glass and stone.