to the newspapers, and to the Chamber of Commerce to suggest and promote new ideas, was saved. He suggested a tower for Calgary, one of the many projects in the run up to Canada’s Centennial year in 1967. In October 1963, Milne wrote to the editor of The Albertan, responding to an editorial about Calgary’s centennial project:
It most certainly should be something which can be admired and shown with pride; a bit of a frill, something we should not otherwise have, of some functional value and of permanent significance. It should also be visually apparent; an integral part of our day to day life and available to all. The Paris Eiffel Tower, New York’s Statue of Liberty, Stuttgart’s Tower and Seattle’s Space Needle all satisfy these requirements and, by their very height, have become architectural pivots and major features of their skylines. A Centennial Tower for Calgary could become the most important element in the city and give our growing core a dramatic accent of monumental proportions. It would be an exciting, imaginative memorial from which every citizen could see the city in its entirety and treat his visitors to a meal in a spectacular manner.
This tower could be a bold stroke which would truly catch the Calgary spirit.[1]
This last line could have been written yesterday, as the city is now engaged in a debate as to whether the white Smithbilt hat is still an appropriate symbol of the Calgary spirit. The 2011 rebranding of the city uses the phrase “Calgary, catch the energy.” The city wants to reify this intangible thing, the Calgary spirit, in hats and hockey arenas, lashed to the old West, while participating at the highest level in the geopolitics of energy production.
The 1960s was a critical decade in Calgary, one in which it changed from being a CPR town based on ranching, wheat farming, brewing, and rail yards connected to Canada and Britain in an east–west manner, to being an oil town connected to Houston by pipelines and air travel. The roots of Calgary were sliced off as a new, aggressive enthusiasm for American modernism took hold, shoving aside the buildings and manners of old Calgary. It was a great time to be an architect, as Bill Milne’s exuberant career shows.
The tower was built, but not by Milne and not on any of the sites he proposed. His described “600 foot golden spire” could have gone on any of the “City owned parking lots as it stands on legs at the base, which would take little from the parking area” or on the James Short School site — a sandstone school made redundant by the urban renewal scrubbing going on in downtown Calgary — or at Mewata, the armoury built for the Canadian Militia during the First World War at the west end of downtown, or Buffalo Stadium, made redundant with the loss of housing in the downtown area. Today, these sites seem completely inexplicable, so devoid are they of any sort of cultural, historic, or geographical resonance. They were just available pieces of land — any would do.
Milne proposed that the tower be “welded steel plate, internally braced to withstand wind loads of up to 100 mph,” thus sitting lightly on the ground in the manner of the Eiffel Tower. The choice of building material reflects the circumstances of the time, as in the early 1960s, the Canadian steel industry was in its greatest period of expansion, seeing a 73 percent increase in production between 1960 and 1965. This was related to production in the U.S., which was similarly high during the period, due to the need for weaponry, aircraft, and vehicles for the Vietnam War; the girders and rebar for the Interstate Highway System; and the continuing consumer demand for automobiles and appliances. However, the U.S. steel industry faced continual labour unrest, and a 116-day strike in 1959 necessitated new channels for foreign steel imports, a need that Canada was ready to fulfill. Canada’s steel industry was self-sufficient and competitive; the Canadian government, guided by C.D. Howe, had pushed it to modernize at a faster rate than the private and more conservative U.S. steel industry and to continually expand, even during the economic slump that followed the end of the Korean War. The Trans-Canada Pipeline project, for example, was designed to stimulate steel consumption, and in 1951 General Motors contracted Algoma to supply steel until 1967 in exchange for long-term financing of the Algoma plant. All of this meant that the Canadian steel industry was well-positioned to be the backup for American steel consumption in the event of protracted labour unrest. Thus, for a narrow window in the early 1960s, following the end of the 1959 American strike, Canada had a lot of steel available for home consumption.
Figure 5-1. The Calgary Tower somewhere around Knox United. This seems a completely random choice of site, but there was probably an empty lot there. In this aerial view that Milne used to test out various tower locations, the CPR station still exists in its original form and not in the mega project that VIA rail, Palliser Square, and the Husky Tower became. The original document in the Provincial Archives of Alberta looks just like this: a pencilled in tower on a 1960s photocopy. We can compare this to the verisimilitude of Photoshopped renderings of today, and the hugely expensive watercolour renderings of twenty-five years ago, which, for a proposal, might have cost $5,000 or more. This scrubby little drawing says much about the confidence of the idea. It wasn’t a vision that needed to be bolstered with convincing graphics.
Provincial Archives of Alberta, Accession Number 2008.0411, Box OCSBx1, 87.
Figure 5-2. It is hard to believe today, but this small, relatively crude pencil drawing was the main image of Milne’s proposal for a centennial tower. This equivalent of the scribble on a napkin indicates a much simpler time for architecture and ideas. The drawing is, in McLuhan terms, so sparing with its information, that it ignites the imagination just enough to sell the idea, which of course, was Milne’s intention.
Provincial Archives of Alberta, Accession Number 2008.0411, Box OCSBx1, 133.
The Trans-Canada Highway was in construction at this time, and one can still see the overpasses from this era constructed from flat plate steel because it was cheap, and never as cheap again, as even cheaper Korean steel soon became the backup for any steel shortages. This is why Milne’s Centennial Tower was proposed as welded steel plate. But Milne did not, in the end, design the tower that was built, although he was instrumental in almost all negotiations leading up to it.
Based on data from Seattle’s Space Needle, a vertical steel cantilever structure built for the 1962 World’s Fair, Milne estimated that the Centennial Tower would cost $3.5 million and, after operating expenses were deducted from revenue, would maintain an annual $280,000 surplus. Its construction would be financed by a combination of City of Calgary funding, public subscription (similar to the funding for Alberta Gas Trunk Lines), and private investors, despite the admission that the projected return was not high enough for a completely private venture.
Concurrent to all of this, the CPR was seeking to redevelop its land where the station and the station gardens had been, between 1st Street East and the Palliser Hotel on 1st Street West, a two-block stretch between 9th Avenue and the CPR main line. The CPR’s New York architects had already recommended a new commercial/office complex (which so offended Gordon Atkins) to replace the station. Into this stepped Bill Milne with his proposal that the Centennial Tower also be built on the site — and it was, funded by Husky Oil, a Wyoming oil refinery headquartered in Calgary, and Marathon Realty, the Canadian Pacific Railway’s land division. Rod Sykes, the assistant general manager of Marathon, wrote to Bill Milne in 1966, complaining that the City of Calgary was interfering with the clarity of the project: “In terms of applying more restrictions to the 9th Avenue traffic and wanting to carve more land off the plaza for traffic purposes — this is not positive thinking. It is entirely negative and it won’t get anything built in Calgary.”[2]
Rod Sykes was the mayor of Calgary from 1969 to 1977, following Jack Leslie, who had been the aldermanic chairman of the City of Calgary Centennial Committee before becoming mayor in 1965. Leslie was instrumental in keeping
