| Huge, scandalous news leapt from the cover of the Calgary Herald on April 7, making a development geek such as myself hyperventilate and momentarily lose bladder control. It was news of a massive downtown development project that will radically change Calgary’s skyline and severely impact one of its most famed landmarks.
Under the heading of "Tower makeover a tall order" came the announcement that our city’s largest phalllic symbol is about to get some… uh, "boys." That’s right, the Calgary Tower – that great KFC bucket on a stick – is getting some cajones.
New owner KingStreet Capital Partners has decided to revitalize the 37-year-old Palliser Square complex by flanking the tower with two 22-storey office blocks. A friend has jokingly suggested that the new towers be referred to as Gonad 1 and Gonad 2. Certainly, if this project gets built, it will forever be the subject of such ridicule, which is the appropriate fate for the ridiculous.
Now, you would think that news of this magnitude would elicit some reaction. Praise. Scorn. Just some kind of response. But it would appear that Calgarians find this announcement neither huge nor scandalous. For better or worse, the Calgary Tower is this city’s iconic building, the focal point of a million cheesy postcards. Not as unique or famous as the Eiffel Tower, not as tall as the CN Tower, not as graceful as Seattle’s Space Needle, it is, nonetheless, our own somewhat renowned landmark structure. And now some guys from Toronto want to box it in with a couple of view-obscuring office blocks and… not a peep from the apathetic citizenry.
Maybe the other scandals making the evening news – the Liberal sponsorship scandal, the Ward 10 voting scandal, the Belinda Stronach defection scandal – have proven more dramatic and salacious than the Tower Jewels debacle. But I’d have expected a few letters to the editor, an overheard discussion in the coffee shop, or a CFCN web poll question. But, perhaps not surprisingly, Calgarians don’t seem to object to this ill-conceived plan. This is, after all, a free enterprise kind of town, and development – any kind of development – is seen as unquestionably good. It represents growth and progress and that greatest of all perceived virtues: jobs. And we, as good Calgarians, tend to view any kind of standard imposed for the public good as an unfair impediment to the heroic works of private business.
But this is, from what I’ve seen, a stupendously bad plan. If you haven’t seen the renderings, KingStreet intends to place a criminally banal glass slab to both the immediate east and west of the tower. My first reaction was that the Calgary Tower was being outfitted with gigantic speakers with which to make the noon-time carillon tunes audible in Airdrie and beyond. The grey-blue curtain-wall, with horizontal striping like an enormous exhaust vent, slams into the sidewalk to create a completely sterile, dehumanizing space at the foot of Calgary’s greatest tourist attraction.
What the KingStreet people and their architects at Gibbs Gage don’t seem to appreciate is that people places can’t be created in barren concrete expanses shadowed by bleak and monolithic office slabs. The world is full of successful public spaces to learn from and it doesn’t take a degree in environmental design to understand what human beings require from their surroundings. While there’s no question that Palliser Square is in need of some form of overhaul, the proposed plan seems intended for a race of worker-droids rather than the flesh-and-blood citizens who will shiver in its gloomy shadow.
The desolate and forsaken plaza might be somewhat forgivable if the office towers had proven to be architecturally significant, but they appear to be second-rate clones of Gibbs Gage’s earlier Ernst and Young tower in Eau Claire that will squat on their cramped site with all the grace of a stripmall 7-11.
And just as the plan disregards the sensibilities of people on the street, it also disrespects the Calgary Tower. It’s a pretty basic planning principle that major civic structures – city halls, churches, museums and monuments – are given preferential sites and room to breathe. You don’t crowd the Taj Mahal, Big Ben or the Sagrada Familia with large, obscuring neighbours – you give them room to be seen and appreciated from a distance. And while our modest tower is no Taj Mahal, it’s all we’ve got and it deserves to be treated with some measure of civility. |
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