| The good the bad and the ugly in city architecture
It is hard to think of a local scene without a locus, to have a sense of community without a common sense of place. For Calgary to become a civic space, not just an efficient marketplace, it is crucial that we all experience it from the same perspective, that senior management actually encounter the homeless at street level. Good architecture and planning encourage this, and we finally seem to have reached a point at which one can view a new construction site with hope rather than dread.
· The good: Public projects, which for ages set the standard for ugliness, are now leading the reconstruction – the Calgary Drop-in Centre, SAIT and the University of Calgary IT buildings are excellent examples of how conservatism and imagination can co-exist. The new McEwan Hall is a disappointment, but at least someone tried.
· The bad: The private sector has not done so well. The new office towers, though somewhat preferable to their predecessors, are just conforming to improved corporate tastes. The same, unfortunately, is not true of domestic architecture, which accounts for most new construction. Two cheerful developments east of Eau Claire aside, almost everything – from the bloated erections of particle board townhouses and low-rise condos downtown to the mushroom houses in the higher-market suburbs – testifies to a puerile fixation with size at the expense of everything else.
· The very, very ugly: The new Convention Centre shows how one bad idea can cancel out a dozen good ones, failing miserably on three crucial fronts: it obliterates one of the last (and most charming) prospects of old Calgary – not the nondescript facades along Stephen Avenue, but the delightful rear view across the parking lot from 7th Avenue; the building itself is hideous, a hodge-podge of ’90s accents ornamenting a cynical excercise in maximizing return on investment; and, as a result of this, the Centre strangles the vital connection between the downtown's business and cultural areas. |
