Sometimes the past looks just like the present.

A 1922 drawing of the skyscraper designed by architects Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer, their vision for the Chicago Tribune tower, is one of these moments. The newspaper had commissioned an international competition for their new building, and while another design that has since become a Chicago landmark was chosen, this unbuilt drawing’s influence can be seen all over the Toronto skyline.

It’s uncanny how it looks like so many condos built in the last 20 years, variations on the 1922 design’s rectangular boxes, glass walls and asymmetrical balconies that jut out of various corners.

Such is the case with Bauhaus designs, where even an unbuilt building can have a great and long influence. Gropius was the Bauhaus’s first director, an art and design school founded in Germany in 1919. Though it was only open until 1933 when the avant-garde institution was shut down due to Nazi pressure, the school’s global impact is being celebrated this year on the occasion of its centenary.

Modernism, urban design and architecture wouldn’t be the same today without the Bauhaus, but the school had just over 1,200 students during its short existence and didn’t produce that many buildings itself, considering how influential it is.

The school also explored and experimented with interior design, and today a walk through Ikea is to see echoes of the concepts and prototypes for furniture and interior fixtures the Bauhaus pioneered.

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Here in Toronto, the school’s influence is mostly indirect but for the TD Centre, one of last buildings architect Mies van der Rohe designed before his death. He was the third and final head of the Bauhaus. The TD Centre, which celebrated its 50th birthday in 2017, represents the clean, minimal design Bauhaus is known for, an esthetic that has shaped building design around the world.

During the years after the First World War, there was an urgency to build new housing for the masses in devastated Europe and the Bauhaus embraced industrial production techniques. As did Canada a few decades later when building affordable housing, often in the form of slab or block apartment buildings, was critical to our postwar prosperity.

Though we build a lot today, there hasn’t been the urge to provide affordable housing for our masses like in the past, though that may be changing. Still, Bauhaus fingerprints are on places such as Parkway Forest at Don Mills Rd. and Sheppard Ave., where new tall and small buildings have been weaved in between ones built half a century earlier. All of it could be said to be “Bauhausesque” in its boxy modernity.

Additionally, and though not as well known for it, the Bauhaus also explored how colour can be used in design, and the Laurentian pencil crayon-inspired columns and other decorative elements on buildings in Parkway Forest, designed by Douglas Coupland, brings those ideas into Toronto’s public space.

Abstract monuments and sculpture were also part of the Bauhaus movement. During the tumultuous political times of the school’s existence, abstract sculptures allowed freedom to express ideas that were too controversial if done literally, but they also didn’t impose just one way for viewers to think about what the monument means.

There are many abstract monuments in Toronto but one that comes to mind is the Katyn Monument on King St. W., near the intersection of Roncesvalles Ave. and Queen St., where a large bronze block with a crack through the middle by architect Tadeusz Janowski was installed in 1980 to memorialize the 15,000 Polish prisoners of war who disappeared from Soviet camps in the Second World War.

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The Bauhaus was also great at creating what today we would call a “brand.” They had their own typeface named “Universal” with rounded letters that they used on their promotional materials and elsewhere. In the same spirit, the TTC commissioned the “Toronto Subway” typeface for the opening of the first stretch of the Yonge line in 1954, creating a uniform look along the line. Use of the type was neglected by the TTC in intervening decades but it has been revived in recent years.

Perhaps the least tangible influence of the Bauhaus is its rejection of placing higher value on the artist rather than the craft or tradesperson. The virtuoso, visionary architect, the “artist” in this case, needs crafts and trades people to realize their visions, though they can be easily overlooked. At Cloud Gardens park on Temperance St., just off Yonge St., is the 1993 “Monument to Construction Workers” by artist Margaret Priest with 27 etchings that celebrate construction trades who build our cities, a very Bauhaus kind of salute to make

More immediately, the Toronto Community Benefits Network is actively working to get more young people trained in the trades, stressing the value and critical need of these professions and vocations. These new apprentices are all students in the Bauhaus tradition.