This design from Allied Works Architecture of Portland, Oregon, was chosen from a shortlist of five firms.

Fast on the heels of the release of the East Village master plan, Cantos Music Foundation has announced the winning design of the new National Music Centre and King Eddy restoration, the first major development in the area.

Allied Works Architecture from Portland, Oregon was selected from a shortlist of five firms with a proposal that aims to blend into the neighbourhood and the landscape of the province and city.

According to Andrew Mosker, executive director of Cantos and one of the nine selection committee members, Allied Works best captured the spirit of the process — the environment and the functionality of a hands-on musical museum. “We felt that, more than anybody else, Allied was able to bring those elements together and really impact the soul of the project and realize the soul of the project, which is important for an arts project,” he says.

The firm has a lot of experience with cultural buildings, including the Seattle Art Museum, the Museum of Art and Design in New York City and the St. Louis Art Museum. Tackling an institution dedicated to music involved a lot of the same skills, according to Brad Cloepfil, founding partner of Allied Works.

“It’s interesting because we’ve done quite a few visual arts museums and I talk to the curators about those,” he says, asking: “Is the building really the instrument that the curators play? You want to find opportunities in the building for installing and inspiring art and it¹s the same thing with this.”

“Through the design process we’ll discover ways that the building can literally be played,” he adds. “That music can happen, ideally, incidentally all over the place, not just in the pre-prescribed formal ways. It’s a place that musicians can come into and say, ‘We want to be on that third-level walkway. We want to do a piece there.’”

Cloepfil is very excited at the opportunity to create a new institution, both physically and conceptually. He contends that this is the most significant cultural development on the continent.

“Right now, there are just so few cultural projects happening in North America,” he says. “So the fact that Calgary, Alberta and the federal government are supporting something like this is an extraordinary vote of confidence in culture.”

The building design involves separate towers clustered and joined together on the block adjacent to the old King Eddy. It’s an intentional separation of spaces, enclosing different program elements of the building — performance, recording and exhibition.

“As you walk among [the buildings], there’s an acoustic separation and an experiential separation,” says Cloepfil. “It’s like walking through different worlds.”

The building as it is currently envisioned will undergo changes as the discussion moves away from aspiration and concept to brick and mortar, but Mosker says the basic design elements and look will remain. The building is a fit for the new master plan in the city’s East Village, something that played a factor in the selection.

“The [Calgary Municipal Land Corporation] did not come out and say, ‘You have to pick one of these,’” says Mosker. “But I was certainly well aware of all their plans and so were all the architects in the competition. I would say it certainly had an influence on the design.”

While the new building, housing the musical collections, performance spaces, recording spaces and hands-on exhibitions, will occupy a now-desolate block, the old King Eddy space will also be retouched, but with a light hand. Something that also set this proposal apart from its competitors.

“My goal is to bring [the King Eddy] back but not sanitize it,” says Cloepfil. “[We’re going to] bring it to life again, but allow it to have a patina of history. I think it’s a great contrast then, to the new centre that rises around it. I like the fact that that building kind of grounds it in the history of Calgary.”

But will they re-install the shag carpets that once covered the tables, soaking up spilled beer? Probably not.

“Now that’s a design solution I’ve never considered,” says Cloepfil with a laugh.