cityscape
New TD Centre Signage Reopens Heritage Debate
A complete heritage assessment of the TD Centre complex was recommended in 2012. Three years later, modernist architecture buffs are still waiting.
The Ernst & Young tower, in happier times. Photo by Ian Muttoo from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.
Since their installation last fall, illuminated signage on the Ernst & Young tower of the TD Centre complex has been lamented by architecture aficionados—most recently, and publicly, in a column from The Globe and Mail. These signs aren’t just a design aberration. Given unresolved heritage considerations, the change probably shouldn’t have happened at all.
In 2012, OCADU professor and modernist-architecture historian Marie-Josée Therrien led a successful citizens’ appeal to overturn provisions that would have allowed TD Centre owners Cadillac Fairview to erect two oversized signs on the outside of the Ernst & Young tower. That tower, also known as Tower Five, was a 1991 addition to a complex built in complement of three noble edifices designed by the legendary modernist architect Mies van der Rohe in the late 1960s. While the van der Rohe originals enjoy the protection of heritage designation—no new signage is in their future—those restrictions do not apply to the complex’s later additions. Signs, bumper stickers, skull-and-crossbones tattoos—it’s all fair game, in theory.
Whether or not signage of any sort belongs on the TD Centre’s towers remains a point of heated contention, with those on the no-logo side of the debate arguing that any corporate signs defile the Miesian design principles that shape the complex as a unit. In other words, treating the individual buildings as individual buildings, irrespective of their famous siblings, is beside the point.
Following the Toronto Preservation Board’s 2012 decision to hold off on outsized signage, the City’s Sign Variance Committee left open the possibility of erecting standard-sized signage in the future. In the meantime, the preservation board recommended that Toronto’s Heritage Preservation Services undergo a full heritage assessment of the entire site—ideally before proceeding with the installation of new logos. But that assessment never happened, and when it will remains anybody’s guess.
“My group was requested to do a heritage assessment and it has been added to a list of evaluations that we will get to, as time allows,” confirms Mary MacDonald, acting manager of Heritage Preservation Services. “So, in short, no, it hasn’t taken place.”
For Therrien, the new signage trumps 2012’s victories. While these signs fall within a standard size, the historian feels that their very presence mars the integrity of van der Rohe’s vision.
“For me, it’s the same thing,” she says. “You’re not respecting the corporate skyline as it was thought by Mies, a pure shape. It’s putting a logo on a monumental piece of art.”