The 47-storey TD Terrace at 160 Front St. W. in Toronto will house offices for Toronto-Dominion Bank and the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
TD Terrace, the office tower at Front and Simcoe Streets in downtown Toronto, is glintingly new and yet a relic of a past age. It originated in that distant period before 2020 when our civilization still built office towers.
Having opened earlier this year, the building seems weirdly out of time: 47 storeys and 1.3 million square feet of aluminum, steel and mirror glass that reach for the sky while keeping the city out.
Developed by Cadillac Fairview, the tower houses employees of Toronto-Dominion Bank and the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, which owns Cadillac. For this project they hired a globally prominent architecture firm, Chicago-based Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill. The firm focuses on supertalls including Saudi Arabia’s 1,000-metre Jeddah Tower, which will be the world’s tallest building.
TD Terrace’s 240-metre height is sculpted into an odd form: a rectangular box that bulges outward in the middle and then tapers to a wedge-shaped point which holds a private amenity space. The shape recalls the old cartoon character Gumby, wrapped in tinfoil. Its large floor plates are ringed with a “sawtooth” façade; each level’s floor-to-ceiling windows tilt downward toward the street, keeping glare away from the occupants.
Gordon Gill, who grew up in Toronto and attended Ryerson University, said these moves reflect his architecture firm’s highly rational mode of design. “Our work is always determined by a mix of physical factors: comfort, thermal performance, arranging the program, and structural concerns,” he said during a recent tour of TD Terrace.
Gordon Gill, left, a partner with Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture, and Brian Salpeter, Executive VP, Development with Cadillac Fairview, lead a tour of TD Terrace in downtown Toronto, on June 17.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
The building is placed to allow north-south winds to slide past, yet protruding panels at the corners catch the wind and break it up. This logic seems unimpeachable, and the details of the façade have a machined beauty.
On the inside, the tower offers a pleasant aerie in the clouds. The Teachers office, designed by Gensler, offers a wealth of comfortable felt-lined meeting booths, copses of plants, colourful wall art and a cafeteria with good, very cheap food. There is no reason for staffers to leave the building. Which is the idea.
If they do, they may notice that TD Terrace is a bad neighbour. Its western façade, along Simcoe Street, is an unbroken expanse of tilted mirror glass panels. This jagged surface feels hostile to pedestrians as it bounces sunlight onto the hot pavement. The building’s main façade, on Front Street, is similarly expressionless until you encounter the retained façade of a 1905 warehouse at its east end. That structure’s red-brick corbels and arches are more interesting than anything on this far more expensive, far more elaborate tower.
The interior and exterior of the TD Terrace.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
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The tower has the unfortunate quality of much recent corporate architecture: It’s interesting from a distance and boring up close. To make things worse, TD has installed gaudy decorative lighting, flashing the bank’s logo and blaring stripes of LED tinsel down the edges of the building.
Times change. In the 1960s, Mies van der Rohe designed TD’s elegant Toronto headquarters with a palette of black steel, grey granite and beige travertine, with yellow daisies for accents. That was enough.
But while Mies’s buildings were urbane, they also introduced the PATH, the underground shopping mall where the bulls and bears of Bay Street spend their free time. The hundreds of thousands who work in the financial district can have lunch in the underground mall and head for a commuter train without ever going outside. They are in the city, close to mass transit, and yet totally segregated from public streets and public life. TD Terrace is, of course, connected to the PATH.
In the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, we learned this model was fundamentally flawed. When fresh air became a lifeline, commerce in the PATH withered. Since then a handful of new restaurants have popped up; TD Terrace has space, as yet vacant, for one more.
I asked Cadillac’s head of development, Brian Salpeter, what lessons the company had learned from the pandemic and whether they would do this project differently today. They would change nothing at all, he said.
Fine. An office landlord is obliged to say that kind of thing. But the city and its citizens are not. If the office tower comes back, it has to be connected to the public realm. Exchange – of goods, of gossip, of ideas – is what a city is for. If return to office means returning to a glazed bubble in the sky, then why bother?