We Built This City

Talking about city architecture and evaluating the best and worst goes beyond simply the good, the bad and the ugly. The built environment is more than just physical forms of stone, mortar, brick and glass, as most architects strive to create spaces of social significance.

In fact, as famous architect Le Corbusier says, “the purpose of construction is to make things hold together, of architecture to move us.”

Wise words from Modernism’s great pioneer, but for the average citizens who move through, among and in these buildings, this might not always be so obvious. Which is why through the critical eyes of five local architects and experts, exploring the nature of Calgary’s buildings becomes an exercise in both symbolic and literal reading. While there was clear consensus on the city’s most significant buildings, many different insights prevailed on which spaces and structures are their not-so-great counterparts.

“Good architecture, and by extension, urban design and the built environment is really a key reflection of people’s values,” says architect Marc Boutin.

So what do our buildings say about our values? Many of the existing urban buildings in Calgary — namely the large towers looming in the core — were built with haste during the late-1970s boom; it isn’t uncommon to find the majority commissioned by architects from Toronto, Vancouver and other North American cities.

Drafted largely on specs from these distant places, they aimed to maximize floor space and square footage over all else. And that created a largely non-descript environment greyed-out in glass panels and concrete. It’s no wonder why trying to pinpoint specific “Calgary-ness” in our architecture proves difficult.

Ben Barrington, partner and director of sustainable design at BKDI Architects, says even the idea of “indigenous [architecture] is something quite elusive because it becomes complicated by design vernacular, egos, corporate identities and any number of things.”

Those “things” include developers — not just architects — building the buildings, plus contractors intimately involved in the design process, compounded by the added pressures of tight budgets and timelines, all of which may remove the finished building from an architect’s initial vision. It becomes apparent why, save for a few exceptions, much of Calgary’s architecture is undistinguished.
Calgary’s best architecture makes an impression and is sustainable, timeless and forward-thinking.

One office building that stands out among its counterparts is Centrium Place along 6th Avenue S.W., downtown. This building illustrates the play and results of intelligently considering public interactions with building walls and exteriors.

"There’s an awareness that the wall is important because the street is important; it’s not an edge that just comes straight down,” says Loraine Fowlow, interim dean of environmental design at the University of Calgary, in praise of the outwardly sloping glass wall that tapers slightly at its base. The tower also breaks from a conventional box form with illuminated corners that span its entire height.

While Centrium Place is notable for its unique exterior, the Southern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium is considered a great building due to what’s inside. John Brown of Housebrand deems it a great building
and an equally great renovation.

"It’s beautifully constructed,” he says. “There really was care and attention paid to detailing and materials.”

Brown says it meets a functional and cultural need as a performing arts centre, but also facilitates, on some level, the spectacle
of performance for the audience.

“The public space at the front end of the auditorium is really critical,” he says. “There’s an ease and grace to the entry and a sequence
as you move up the steps to go up the larger stairs. It’s a place to see and be seen.”

In the same way the Jubilee is sensitive to its context and its users, the City of Calgary’s Water Centre is another space that, although
just completed last year, is already an iconic architectural statement.
“It doesn’t look like any other building in Calgary,” says Barrington. This LEED silver level-certified building was carefully designed to conserve water and energy and reduces its footprint on the environment by using materials such as wheat grass panelling instead of drywall.

“Everything that’s there is probably holding something else up — it uses less material and often the structure itself is the finished material,” Barrington says. “You get a better sense of how the building functions, being able to see all the pieces of it.”

The Water Centre also features public art in its main lobby and an exterior water garden to promote public interaction.Features like these create reasons for people to visit the site and not to just pass by.

It’s an idea that also prevails at one of the city’s best overall buildings: the Nexen building on 7th Avenue and 8th Street S.W.
Valentine in the 1980s, this modernist 37-
storey steel-and-glass tower is turned on a 45-degree axis to minimize sunshading on the adjacent park and sits back from the sidewalk to allow people passing, entering or exiting the building to have a forecourt to engage in.

“It’s shaped in such a way to provide as much sunshine to the interior winter garden and the exterior Century Garden,” says Enzo Vicenzino, principal at Stantec Architecture.

Boutin says the Nexen building is unique in that it dynamically changes from all perspectives, not only for pedestrians and drivers, but also the employees who work in its offices.

“We have a wonderful shifting quality of light in the sky . . . this building really plays with that poetic sense of place in Calgary,” he says.

Jump forward almost 30 years and another clear forerunner marking what Calgary architecture is capable of is the M-Tech building. Completed in 2004, this slick and contem-porary white composite metal office building on Macleod Trail and 14th Avenue S.E. is headquarters for an identity management company.

“It’s this little jewel that’s alone right now in the Beltline, but hopefully it will inspire other properties around it to meet its quality,” says Fowlow, who reviewed the site for Canadian Architect. She points out innovative features such as a hanging box in the atrium and an integrated bus shelter on the northeast corner.

Barrington says it not only accurately reflects its tenant — a hi-tech building for a hi-tech company — but also the time we live in.

“It doesn’t try to replicate or copy anything of another era.”

Architecture cognizant of its place and time is most relevant to a city and its people. For this very reason, most of the architects we questioned scorned architecture that illustrates faux history or mimicry, poor use of space and that fails to provide meaningful realms for social interaction.

The sense that the city’s architecture is bland and generic is what the architects and experts we talked to most indentified when picking out their most hated buildings. And for this reason many didn’t have one building as an example, but rather a whole group.

“When you look at these [downtown office] buildings, they are very unremarkable buildings,” says Boutin, gesturing out the window of his own office on 1st Street between 10th and 11th Avenue S.W. “We live, in that sense, in an unremarkable city.”

He explains that Calgary’s downtown office buildings are largely speculative and conceived by developers who don’t have a specific owner or client in mind because more often than not, these spaces are rented or leased. “It almost has to be as generic as possible to identify with the greatest number of people.”

Brown agrees and points out the same notion underlies the design of “fast-food architecture” in Calgary’s new suburban communities — his choice for the city’s worst architectural form.

Brown says Calgary’s subdivisions have far worse and bigger impact on the city than any one particular building because, by nature, they involve entire networks of neighbourhoods, relationships to surrounding roads and a location on the outskirts of town.

“Because of the enormous growth of the last five or six years, there’s a lowest sort of denominator push, and people assume development is a right they have rather than a beginning of an obligation,” he says.

Architects, Brown says, are only involved with about three to five per cent of the residential work in the city, which leaves “all that stuff out there happening without any sort of input.” Communities like Arbour Lake, he says, are examples of architectural design that primarily end up promoting car use over good city living.

“There are usually only two entrances in, there’s freeway all around it and if you want to get from Arbour Lake to the next community over, you have to go out onto the main arterial, out the main entrance beside the few little convenience stores, drive around and then into the next community,” he says. “It’s a very fragmented and isolated, private kind of environment.”

Especially in a city, where spaces and structures are inevitably in concert with one another, our buildings have larger roles to play, says Fowlow. “My biggest pet peeve right now is Olympic Plaza,” she says. “You can’t even walk across it. To me, the nature of a public space is how you can move across it. With the edges of the plaza, two of them are missing essentially. You only come to do something — to skate, to watch a show — but do you come and hang out and meet your friends there? I don’t know.”

Fowlow adds that because the plaza was designed for one thing — the 1988 Winter Olympic medal ceremonies — it’s limited in meaning beyond this single purpose.

Another lost opportunity area that Barrington identifies is the 23-unit townhouse condos of River Run, which sit between Eau Claire Market and the river. He says he’s not against condos built on the river, but feels creating a plaza in conjunction with Eau Claire that allows visual and physical access to the river would have been more beneficial to the general public.

“The public view and our relationship to the river is blocked by that condo development,” he says. Other barriers and voids, or what Boutin terms “black boxes,” are the city’s casinos and convention centres. He points to the Elbow River Casino as a poorly conceived building because it fails to contribute to the public realm.

“It just doesn’t make sense to incorporate [casinos] into the inner city,” he says. Even wrapping commercial property around the casino itself would create a more participatory experience for passersby, but as it sits currently, Boutin says, “it doesn’t define or participate with the street . . . all you see is opaque glass windows that you can’t even see inside.”

For Vicenzino, another large “wall” is cast by the Calgary Municipal Building. While he notes that the west-facing façade is visually interesting with plenty of open space, the building ultimately fails on the east side.

“It’s essentially a blank wall. Yes, there’s a lot of glass, but it’s so sharp and definitive. ‘The city stops here’ is what that tells me,” he says. “[The Calgary Municipal Building] doesn’t address the East Village at all, except for maybe a secondary door on the side, but that’s it.”

This relationship between the spaces we build and the environment that in turn build us as citizens means that new projects can provide opportunities to set architectural precedents and challenge our notions of what buildings are. Moving forward, exceptional buildings rather than the few exceptions to the norm can launch Calgary forward as a truly contemporary city.

Whether that vision comes from a local designer or an international star like the much-touted Sir Norman Foster for the Bow, it rests on finding new and different ways to intelligently interpret this place with tolerance for diverse possibilities. With so many areas in transition throughout the city, Fowlow says there are huge opportunities, not just for experimentation, but to even depart completely from what is seen as “normal Calgary architecture.”

Boutin agrees this type of experimentation is deeply needed. “The worst thing we can do [as architects] is to not give people alternatives,” he says. “Then they don’t have the capacity to think of how great architecture can be because they’ve never seen it.”

While we are always quick to champion our natural environment, Brown says we don’t yet have the same sense of preciousness for the city. The buildings themselves reflect a city characterized by boom and bust with a transient population with no incentive to lay down roots.

“When things are booming, there’s just not enough time to think about it,” agrees Boutin. “When there’s a bust, everyone just leaves. Therein lies the dilemma with Calgary.”

Fowlow puts her finger on the heart of the matter when she muses: “I always find it interesting to visit cities that are ‘finished’ and not perpetually under construction.”

As the city continues to transform before our eyes, only time will tell what a fully realized Calgary is capable of achieving.

The architects and firms behind some of Calgary's best buildings

What are your thoughts on Calgary's architecture?