| Last month in this column some of Calgary’s up and coming designers and architects offered perspective and opinion on the evolution of the city’s built environment – what the current architectural milieu might mean to the future look and scope of Calgary’s skyline. With the boom of development that initiated this discussion, it seems appropriate to peek further into the ever increasing slate of construction going up in the city. This is no easy task considering, as one stat suggests, that once all of the projects already green-lighted here break ground, Calgary will be centre to over 50 per cent of the entire country’s new office building construction. Almost 3,000 storeys of space, totalling nearly 2,250,000 sq metres of new floor space, including residential projects. That’s a lot of construction, a lot of steel and a whole lot of concrete.
While cataloguing such an extensive amount of development is somewhat Herculean, one local graphic designer has managed to take on the equally time-consuming task of portraying what that future skyline will look like once everything underway downtown is up and the cranes disappear again. Estimates suggest the major projects will wrap up around 2011.
Devin Henry is a graduate graphic designer who works for a local real estate group. This allows him to merge his design skills with a passion for architecture. Henry has merged the architectural renderings released by the various groups responsible with existing digital photography of the city’s skyline – in some cases stitching together up to 15 separate images to create his depictions of Calgary’s future skyline. While he creates the images as a hobby, his work has been getting increasing attention.
Images shown here are a before and an imagined after of the city skyline looking east and a depiction looking westward. The latter includes the Norman Foster and Partners designed Bow complex, Sasso/Vetro, Nuera, three of the upcoming four Arriva buildings, the Pennylane Towers and the proposed Exchange Towers. The collection of new buildings in the core almost completely eclipses the traditional Calgary skyline from this vantage point.
More of Henry’s work can be found at www.bussmarketing.ca, including a labelled panoramic of the city from the vantage point of a virtual Calgary Tower.
Image one – before and after, looking east
Image two – before and after, downtown core, looking west
1. Vetro and Sasso
2. Proposed M-Tech Residential
3. Nuera 1 and 2
4. Stampede Station
5. Montreux
6. Xenex
7. Costello
8. Astoria
9. The Exchange
10. Keynote
11. Arriva 1, 2, 3
12. Palliser 1 and 2
13. The Bow
14. Union Square |
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