The Globe and Mail reports in its Saturday edition that TD Terrace, the office tower at Front and Simcoe streets in central Toronto, is glintingly new and yet a relic of a past age. The Globe's Alex Bozikovic writes that 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.
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 prominent Chicago architecture firm 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. The tower has the unfortunate quality of much recent corporate architecture: It is interesting from a distance and boring up close.
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