9-1. This drawing is looking west down 7th Avenue. The Hudson’s Bay Company is on the left, its skywalk to the parkade is over the street, and close on the left is Central United Church. Milne has introduced a fine grain of diagonals throughout the city, including angled parking and cross-intersection pedestrian paving with kiosks and planting. It turns a fairly indifferent grid into a series of intimate block-long islands.Provincial Archives of Alberta, Accession Number 2008.0411.
Figure 9-2. A Beltway overpass separating traffic from pedestrians. Milne thought these overpasses would be quite exciting. His drawing is a bit odd, scale-wise, with only nine or ten steps up and a sloped ramp over the road, where tiny buses and cars have been drawn. In reality, any overpass would be more like the scale of the ones found at LRT stations, with two storeys up, massive construction, and safety standards. This is a lovely image, however, illustrating the thought that traffic could be an entertainment and pedestrian bridges could be so minimal.
Provincial Archives of Alberta, Accession Number 2008.0411.
[1] W.G. Milne fonds, Provincial Archives of Alberta, acc. no. 2008.0411.
Chapter 10
The Calgary Civic Centre
In terms of major revision of downtown ordering, we can start with the 1978 plan by Harold Hanen and Raymond Moriyama for the Calgary Civic Centre, the future of which was decided by a public referendum. This was a major architectural project for a new municipal building and a reworking of several blocks around it. Documentation for this project as it was presented to the Calgary public was unusual, consisting of a booklet that lays out the environmental, climate-related, social, and historic conditions for building a new civic centre. These design conditions were theoretical, illustrated by diagrams, and essentially sound. Hanen’s interest in winter cities began with this project, leading to his involvement with the Winter Cities Association.
Figure 10-1. In broad strokes, the proposed civic realm wrapped around a large open plaza, which corresponds today to Olympic Plaza. On the south side of the plaza was a theatre and night-life district with a major hotel. This was the zone that became the Calgary Centre for Performing Arts. Office and commercial building are lightly dotted into the northwest corner. The tiny cross-hatched shape centre top is the old City Hall; clearly, the new civic realm was meant to extend well into east Calgary.
Harold Hanen fonds, Glenbow Museum and Archives, M8906-261.
The proposal was backed by a hard plan and a huge massing model of the project. Various civic groups and organizations protested it loudly, mainly on an estimation of its cost, and the debate carried out largely in the Calgary Herald. In 1980 the City of Calgary arranged a plebiscite on the project, and it was narrowly rejected.
The Civic Centre proposed a number of block-long low-rise megastructures that included a performing arts centre, the existing Calgary Public Building (the original Government of Canada building on 8th Avenue), and the Burns Building, a white terracotta office building built in 1913, which, while beautiful, was also rundown and full of small offices and artists’ studios. The original city hall building was also meant to stay. It did come to pass that the Calgary Centre for Performing Arts occupied the entire block between 8th and 9th Avenues and 1st and 2nd Streets East, incorporating both the Public and the Burns Buildings. This was in the future, however.
Harold Hanen is a difficult architectural figure in Calgary’s development. Calgary-born, he ended his career as a great conservationist and was instrumental in the protection and restoration of several historic downtown buildings and Stephen Avenue. This avenue was the original commercial section of 8th Avenue lined with two- and three-storey sandstone and brick buildings built largely between 1900 and the First World War. While Hanen was an employee of the City of Calgary in the 1960s, he introduced the +15 system that now connects most of the downtown with a series of semi-public enclosed bridges at the second storey. The +15 system has been debated ever since. On one hand, it winterizes the city in accordance with Winter City precepts, introducing a weather-protected semi-public retail environment that breaks down the isolation of individual tower blocks. On the other, it guts the importance and the liveliness of the traditional street and public open retail space — the sidewalks and storefronts of the city.
Figure 10-2. Street level views of the massing model, showing the Burns Building (top) in its new context, and below, the central atrium (also see figure 10-4).
Canadian Architectural Archives, University of Calgary.
Figure 10-3. The massing strategies for the 1978 Civic Centre are very sculptural. A five-story block, for example, is stepped and carved into a complex ziggurat kind of building. Step-backs allow more light and sun at street level, and they provide roof terraces and break up the scale of what is proposed as very large buildings. This view, by the placement of the old City Hall and the Burns building, shows how much this scheme offered to east downtown. It would have been a critical joint between east and west.
Canadian Architectural Archives, University of Calgary.
Figure 10-4. This could only be the 1970s. This multi-storey atrium bears a close resemblance to Toronto’s Eaton Centre, which had just opened, in 1977. This particular space was meant to be threaded into the then-new +15 and +30 walkway system meant eventually to connect all downtown buildings through multiple levels — a three-dimensional street grid.
Harold Hanen fonds, Glenbow Museum and Archives, M8906-261.
Hanen’s proposed Civic Centre was straight out of the urban renewal textbook of erasure of historic patterns in favour of civic spatial reorganization into new quasi-ceremonial “gathering spaces.” The Civic Centre took four blocks, excavated the central portion for an enormous plaza, and arranged the buildings into a west-facing U-shape. A smaller plaza faced east, continuing 8th Avenue more or less unchanged. Although this plan was rejected, not for its spatiality but for its supposed cost, two parts of it were built: the Calgary Centre for Performing Arts and the Calgary Municipal Building, which dead-ended 8th Avenue before its time.
Both of these plans — the +15 system and the Civic Centre — magnified social polarities in the downtown core. The +15, like the underground malls of most Canadian cities, had the effect of abandoning the ground-level streets and sidewalks to everyone not allowed to use the +15: panhandlers, homeless people, buskers, kids, anyone with dogs, and the poor without reason to trip along the corporate atmosphere all run into private security personnel. In cities without such an alternative pedestrian system, everyone must rub along on busy sidewalks, a clear Jane Jacobs–type definition of a vibrant urbanism. The argument put forth in support of +15 systems is that Calgary’s weather demands enclosure, a strangely wimpish reasoning given Calgary citizenry’s intense fitness regimes that have people cycling the bike trails into downtown all winter and spending their lunch hours jogging or power-walking those same trails, summer and winter alike. There is a more convincing economic argument, though, in that retail space is doubled: a Starbucks on the street, and one fifteen feet above; two floors of retail mall space rather than just street-level shops. The ultimate illustration of the multi-storey potential of the +15, +30,
