6. Toronto City Hall - 100 Queen Street West

Here in Nathan Phillips Square at the base of the middle Freedom Arch closest to Queen Street is Toronto’s very own chunk of the Berlin Wall. This piece of the wall was purchased by Marcus Hess, an engineer from Kitchener, and flown over by the German Consulate in 1991, one of many pieces of the wall that made their way around the world.

City Hall itself was opened in 1965 and designed by Finnish architect Viljo Revell. It carried on Bauhaus traditions as craftwork is quite evident in its construction. Get up close to it and look at the details, especially the fine stone grain of the towers, the tile work and door handles. It’s an expressionistic building, with modern construction techniques that demanded new forms, like the weightless-seeming concrete in these arches and the council chamber “clamshell”. Like the Bauhaus school’s design ethos itself with three distinct wings, City Hall has a separation of uses connected by bridges, stairwells and in between places where people can meet.

Abstraction was also important to the Bauhaus, as it existed in a tense political environment and indirect ways were needed to make a statement. The Archer sculpture by Henry Moore in the square closer to City Hall continues the tradition of abstraction, and existed in its own tense political climate as its cost became an issue when City Hall opened, and it was paid for by private donation.