Guest Post: Calgary Skyscrapers
Written by Dr. Graham Livesey, Professor in the Master of Architecture Program (School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape) at the University of Calgary.
In the 1950s Calgary’s skyline was still dominated by the Palliser Hotel, the 12-storey CP railway hotel designed by the important Montreal architecture firm of Edward and W.S. Maxwell and opened in 1914. Eventually taller buildings began to be built after WWII, including the Elveden Centre by Rule, Wynn & Rule.
The Elveden Centre. Photo by Chuck Szmurlo taken April 13, 2007.
Completed in 1964 and owned by a subsidiary of Ireland’s Guinness family, the Elveden Cenre was the tallest building in Calgary and one of the tallest in Western Canada, with the central tower at twenty storeys. The vying for tallest building, or structure, in Calgary is documented at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_in_Calgary. Elveden Centre would be quickly surpassed by the Calgary Tower designed by William Milne with A. Dale & Associates in 1968. The Calgary Tower remained the tallest structure in the city until 1983. Winning many accolades for its height and daring construction, the structure is 190.8 metres tall and has been a key landmark ever since.
Aerial view of Calgary Tower and surrounding area. Photo from the Glenbow Archives.
In the 1970s, as Calgary boomed, a series of office towers were completed downtown, designed by such noteworthy firms as Skidmore Owings & Merrill (SOM) from New York and Chicago, and Toronto’s Webb Zerafa Menkes Housden (WZMH). The book by Pierre S. Guimond and Brian R. Sinclair entitled Calgary Architecture: The Boom Years 1972-1982 provides a comprehensive record of the period. Of the towers from this period the three most important include Toronto-Dominion Square by SOM and J.H. Cook Architects and Engineers (1977) which mimics the dark colours of Toronto-Dominion’s signature headquarters complex in downtown Toronto by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. TD Square also includes the Devonian Gardens which continues to be a much-loved winter garden for Calgarians.
Arguably the best of the office towers from the 1970s is the Nova Building (now Nexen Building) by Calgary-based J.H. Cook Architects and Engineers (1982) which boldly occupies a site east of Century Gardens and showcases sharp forms, a well-designed indoor garden, and a shiny stainless-steel skin. The project received a Governor General’s Award in 1983.
Aerial view of Nova building and surrounding area. Photo from the Glenbow Archives.
The third example is the controversial Petro-Canada Centre (now Suncor Energy Centre) by WZMH which remains a landmark project. Completed in 1984 and featuring two dramatically angular red granite-clad towers linked by an atrium, it was the tallest building complex in the city from 1984 until 2010. There were a number of other Calgary architecture firms that designed towers in this period including The Chandler Kennedy Architectural Group and The LeBlond Partnership.
By the 1980s Postmodernism was impacting the design of tall buildings. This typically meant that the designs worked with the surrounding urban environment more effectively, and the buildings used more traditional approaches to design including supporting distinctive tops. This is very much the case for the twin towers designed for Bankers Hall by Calgary-based Cohos Evamy & Partners; the complex has to be considered one of the finest period examples in the country (the towers were completed in 1989 and 2000).
Bankers Hall West and East in Calgary, Alberta looking north from St. Mary's Cemetary. Photo by Chuck Szmurlo taken March 5, 2007.
Another unique Postmodern project designed just prior to Bankers Hall, but never built, was Park Centre by the prolific American firm Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates. Unbuilt projects are part of a city’s history, many of these have been documented in Guimond and Sinclair’s book, and in Stephanie White’s book Unbuilt Calgary: The City That Might Have Been (Dundurn Press, 2012).
In recent years Calgary has been subject to the vicissitudes of “starchitecture,” notably with the construction of The Bow and Telus Sky. The Bow, designed by Foster + Partners with Zeidler Partnership Architects was the tallest building in the city from 2012-2017; the building is very large, uses an iconic diagrid, and a striking crescent-shaped plan.
The Bow. Photo from Western Investor.
Telus Sky by the Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) and Dialog, will be the third tallest skyscraper in the city, and features an unusual pixelated and tapering form that changes shape as one moves around it. Brookfield Place East is now the tallest building in Calgary at 247 metres and 56 storeys, just shy of the new Stantec Tower in Edmonton, the tallest building in the country outside of Toronto.
Ultimately, because of the strength of Calgary’s economy, the city’s skyline has transformed dramatically in the last 60 years. Among the many more ordinary skyscrapers, buildings like the former Petro-Canada Centre, The Bow, and Telus Sky stand out.
Graham Livesey is a Professor in the Master of Architecture Program (School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape) at the University of Calgary. He has written and edited extensively on modern architecture and urbanism, with two books of essays (including the recently published Ecologies of the Early Garden City) and two large architectural anthologies for Routledge. He is also the co-editor (with Elsa Lam) of the book Canadian Modern Architecture, 1967 to the Present published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2019. Livesey is a regional correspondent for Canadian Architect magazine. In 2019 he was elected to the College of Fellows of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada. Graham has served as a board member of Heritage Calgary since 2019.