The Domus guide to Toronto

City of design, art, and entertainment: Toronto is the beating heart of Canadian dynamism. Here, history and innovation come face to face in a continuous dialogue and experimentation between history and contemporaneity. The city is thus a collection of architectural events: punctuating the plot of skyscrapers, low brutalist buildings invert the relationship between glass and concrete, bricks decorate the Art Nouveau facades, coloring even one of the “flatiron” buildings that dot North America red. This all happens at the foot of the famous CN tower, a symbol of the Toronto skyline, and one of the tallest self-supporting telecommunications towers in the world.
In contrast to this rising city, then, there is the so-called PATH. It is a network of underground passages built to cope with the harsh winter climate, which allows people to move between the main points of the city center without almost ever going outdoors. Thus, the capital of Ontario becomes a crossroads of architecture and ways of thinking about space: from the bay-and-gable style – a variation of the Victorian style in the southern area of Ontario – to Philip Johnson’s postmodernism in the headquarters of the CBC broadcasts, but also the city of the great masters of the past century, with projects that resonate in the urban design of the metropolis, from Mies van der Rohe to Arthur Erickson, who Johnson himself defined as the greatest architect of Canada, or perhaps of the entire American continent. Alongside them, contemporary architecture stands out, among the experiments of Libeskind, Gehry, and Snohetta, in multifaceted language, capable of uniting the rigor and rationality of Pritzker prize winner Fumihiko Maki with the formal extravagance of Mad Architects. This guide explores different neighborhoods of Toronto, crossing their most relevant architecture in a moment of substantial expansion and transformation of the city. New buildings will grow close to these architectures, bringing famous Canadian studios such as Moriyama Teshima Architects to close BIG’s interventions – in an American version of the Mountain dwelling – and a new iconic skyscraper designed by Studio Gang.

One of Canada’s most celebrated concert halls, the Roy Thomson hall, was designed by one of the masters of North American architecture, Arthur Erickson. Here, his flair and experimentalism generated a unique space. The square plan develops a glazed roof connected with a circular element, in a study of pre-computerized form, revealing its futurist identity when considering that the design dates back to 1976. The interior, therefore, divides into an external, transparent circulation space in which the space is continuous and seamless. From here, entering the concert hall, which reverses the external transparency into a controlled and heavy space in which exposed concrete and wood blocks build sails and stalls facing the stage.

The last major project by Mies van der Rohe was in Toronto, and it was one of the first projects to transform the downtown into a dense complex of skyscrapers. Following his remarkable fame in North America, Mies was called upon to design the new financial center, into which he incorporated all the stylistic features that characterized his work. Therefore, we can find reminiscences of the Seagram building in the scanning of the buildings, just as seems to be an apparent reference to the Federal Center in nearby Chicago, where the positioning of the towers generates an ample public space, partly occupied by a low building that transforms the void into a unique moment within the fabric of the city. Finally, the open space incorporates paved strips and gardens, building a new horizontality revealed in an urban-scale podium capable of bringing architecture and the city together.

Known as the CN Tower, this architecture has etched a recognizable mark on the Canadian city skyline. Not only does its figure rise slender and in contrast to the glazed volumes of the skyscrapers, but CN Tower is one of the tallest freestanding structures in the world. The central concrete body serves as the sole pillar of the telecommunications tower, reaching 553 meters in height. This single structural element takes the shape of a Y at the base, and its hollow core contains the stairwells, elevators, and all technical connections. Before the top, a volume accommodates several spaces open to the public and characterizes the tapering of the pillar. 

Covering the Heritage Square passageway, Calatrava’s intervention conceived an independent element to the existing buildings, integrating a gallery in which individual elements compose a sculptural and luminous space. By sheltering from the city’s cold and providing access to PATH, Toronto’s downtown underground pedestrian network, Brookfield Place generates a public space that echoes European cathedrals. Indeed, walking through the gallery gives the impression of being in a grand nave, where metal elements are composed in monumental arches that radically redefine the space. 

Famous for his works characterized by substantial experimentalism, Alsop built the extension of the School of Design in Toronto. Here, the architect twists the idea of an extension, designing a superstructure that towers above the surrounding buildings, generating a parallelepiped that seems to fly over the city. The colorful pillars, the red access ramp, and even the volume’s facades that resemble a contemporary mosaic return a graphic, almost playful value to the project. The extension thus looks like a modern sculpture, an organism foreign to the city itself yet capable of interpreting its most unpredictable character.

The Art Gallery of Ontario is one of the most important museums in Toronto. Founded in 1900, the museum’s architecture has undergone several expansions. The expansion completed in 2008 saw the international firm of Frank Gehry at work, which, through a few significant signs, transformed the language and relationship between the museum’s interior spaces and the urban scene. The project is revealed primarily through two elements. The first is the new facade, which, by expanding the interior, declines the deconstructivist language into a surface that bends, exfoliating and redefining the museum’s urban front. Inside, on the other hand, the monumental wooden staircase generates a convulsive space that expands and compresses, leading the visitor to a unique experience through the different floors of the museum.

The result of the international competition held in 1958 had Finn Revell’s design as the winning project, directly selected by Eero Saarinen. The architecture, an expression of the functionalist school of which the architect was an exponent, sees a complex of buildings arranged within a large mineral plaza. The offices are developed in two vertical bodies, which, like blades, curve and embrace a low volume, the centerpiece of the town hall, which houses the council chamber. The square, characterized by a large paved area, a swimming pool, and concrete arches, sees a walkway at a higher elevation perimeter of the public space. This connects with the buildings, relating urban design and architecture.

Inspired by the ancient Greek Agora and Stoa, the Norwegian firm places a Student Learning Centre within the established fabric of Toronto. Eight stories high, the center houses students from Toronto Metropolitan University, offering a variety of functions, from a library to secluded spaces for individual study. What is striking about the project, however, is undoubtedly the exterior façade. This sees digitally printed frosted glass, which collaborates to control interior shading. In addition, a large canopy clad in hand-folded metal panels extends from the exterior to the atrium, which becomes a worked ceiling with sculptural value.

Robarts Library is a monument to Brutalist architecture. Almost as if to concretize a fortress of knowledge, the library, connected to the University of Toronto, presents itself as a monumental building. Precast concrete organizes a triangular floor plan related to the smaller section of rare books. There are numerous references to the architecture of Louis Kahn, as visible in the treatment of the ceilings that recall the famous Yale University Art Gallery. In general, the architecture of the library becomes that of a city, where ramps, staircases, and large halls provide a counterpoint to small niches and smaller corridors, where the feeling is that of finding oneself inside a medieval castle, transformed by the poetics of concrete into a place of culture.

The design for the Royal Ontario Museum saw Studio Libeskind confront the theme of museum extension. The existing building is transformed through geometric prisms, and its old facade becomes an interior screen that appears and disappears. The window bands become diagonal cuts that break the surface of the volumes and produce large light spaces in the interiors, which wind through bridges, passages, small loops, and large lobbies. The project thus has an essential urban soul: the spatial sequence allows the interior and exterior, existing and new, to be transfixed in a complex but continuous dialectic that equates to the importance of architectural space and contained exposure.

KPMB Architects is certainly one of the leading firms in the contemporary Canadian scene. With their modern and dry language, the designers use a language where opaque blades contain glazed volumes, thus building the spaces of architecture. This is also how Canada’s National Ballet School can be described. The pre-existing brick building is isolated from the new intervention, connecting at the back, while the new volumes open up as transparent bodies. The ballrooms thus project onto the urban scene, making the architecture a large screen.

Built north of downtown Toronto, the design is resolutely modern and interprets the poetics of Pritzker Prize winner Fumihiko Maki, a student of Kenzo Tange. The museum is a stereometric, white volume whose form is hollowed out by perforations that emphasize the architecture’s monumentality and the architectural mass’s solidity. If, on the outside, however, the architecture appears impermeable, the large windows render a bright interior. Also enhancing the entry of natural light is the large interior courtyard, whose glazing recalls the textures of patterns typical of Islamic tradition, as is the case in the exterior paving.

Moriyama & Teshima, referring to the Ismaili Center and the Aga Khan Museum, commented, “The whole site is a harmonious union of the spiritual, artistic, and natural worlds.” In fact, Correa designs a prismatic glass volume that generates urban tension with Maki’s work. The prism, which looks like a light curtain resting on the stone base, thus sees a structure clad in limestone, granite, and concrete that dialogues with the Aga Khan’s finishes. Natural light permeates the space in a continuous relationship between the purity and whiteness of the architecture and the surrounding nature. Spirituality is thus translated with modern forms capable of being charged with a high religious value.

The two fluid and sculptural Absolute Towers are in Mississauga, an agglomeration west of Toronto. The focus on sinuous forms that characterize Mad Architects’ output here sees the volume of two skyscrapers transform as if struck and transformed by the wind. As with many of Toronto’s tower buildings, one of the characteristic elements is undoubtedly the exterior walkway that runs along the entire perimeter. This allows the architecture to set back the glazed body and play with shadows to increase the sense of slenderness of the architecture and thus increase the dynamism of the two bodies.