1. Goethe-Institut - 100 University Avenue

2019 was the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus founding in Dessau, a small city south of Berlin. Though the art and design school was only open until 1933 and had less than 500 graduates and only 1250 students in total, its influence and legacy reached far beyond Germany and can be found around the world, even here in Toronto, and both modernism and urbanism wouldn’t be the same today without the Bauhaus.

In 1922 the Bauhaus’s first director, architect Walter Gropius, submitted a design for the Chicago Tribune tower along with Adolf Meyer. Though they did not win the international competition, it’s uncanny how their design looks like so many condos and office towers built in the last 20 years, all variations on the rectangular boxes, glass walls and symmetrical balconies that jut out of various corners. Its progressive art and design ethos was that forward thinking. Let’s go for a walk and find more Bauhaus influences nearby.