The case for a classical building in Calgary’s Inglewood
So: Calgary is a relatively young city, having evolved in a mere 120 years from a proto-RCMP fort near a river into vast suburban sprawl surrounding a dead-after-5pm downtown of mostly bad skyscrapers with zero street life. Sadly, its fetish for new! New! NEW! buildings at the expense of beautiful, livable streetscapes means that it may be on the verge of ruining what was, in 2014, called “Canada’s Best Neighborhood,” Inglewood.
Unlike Montreal or Toronto, Calgary doesn’t have centuries of older neighborhoods layered together with human-scaled places, defined by Enlightenment-era buildings and city planning.
Calgary was pretty much defined in growth spurts related to the creation of the oil biz - a major one in the 1960s and again in the early 2000s - and went in massively for car-centric urban designs. In that 120 years, a few independent towns were gradually absorbed over time and the spaces between filled in.
That means we don’t have a ton of older streets and buildings left. Many were demolished; we have a few “century homes” preserved, but only a few neighbourhoods retain what we would call “complete streets” that have traditional street-level retail and mixed-use buildings, and whose sidewalks accommodate pedestrians properly.
Most of Calgary outside the central older hoods is Houston-style cul-de-sacs, highways and malls.
Inglewood, the neighbourhood just to the SE of downtown, along 9th Avenue, is arguably the original main street of the city. Century-old red brick and stone-clad buildings mixed with low-rise infill, mixed use retail & residential, groceries, cafés, old school buildings and century homes, lots of restaurants & a few show venues. In 2014, it was named “Canada’s best neighbourhood” by the Canadian Institute of Planners.
Naturally new buildings are creeping in - most recently a sadly generic-looking mixed use condo/retail project at 9th & 9th, and there are proposals for more OK, but generic-y condo developments further down near Deerfoot Trail.
But then there’s this 12-story glass blob monstrosity proposed by the firm RNDSQR, which will sit where a used car lot once was (good!) and theoretically add more street level retail, but violates the height restriction for the area, and - crucially - completely clashes with the historic character of its neighbours (bad!)
Did someone lose their roll of bubble wrap? This is the proposed view of the other side, showing the Visitors’ spaceship overshadowing the historic lawn bowling club.
I’m looking at this - knowing, of course, that it’s all just a rendering and whatever gets built will be different and probably worse - and I find myself wondering why people are falling all over themselves to praise this.
The urban critic James Howard Kunstler correctly notes that buildings like this do not induce joy, they induce dread in people who have to live near them. (Starchitect Libeskind has said that’s the point of some of his buildings, and that’s certainly what I feel when I see what he did to the Royal Ontario Museum, which now is admitting that it was a huge failure.) Kunstler goes on to say that our lives are fraught and filled with chaos and our times are becoming more chaotic thanks to the short-sighted decisions of the cheap oil era. We need a built environment that is welcoming and comforting, that roots us in the past while pointing us towards our future, and is not intentionally hostile for the sake of winning some sort of architectural in-joke award.
These buildings are literally alienating; they are utterly alien. You cannot see any trace of the human being here. There are no details. There is no trace of the human hand at work.
Crucially, there is no reference to the classical orders, none of the carefully worked-out system of architectural elements based on human proportions, optics, and theories of beauty, that originated in classical Greece and Rome, then revived by Renaissance builders like Palladio, and then re-rediscovered by 18th century British architects James Stuart and Nicholas Revett. “The dignity of the upright human figure,” as Kunstler says, “is nowhere to be found.”
One reason, perhaps for this, is that classical orders literally aren’t taught in most architecture schools anymore, and neither is hand drawing - or ergonomics or accessibility for that matter.
Visually, the scale of each of these triangles / diamonds and large glass panels are far larger than anything a human could handle. It doesn’t look like a building made for people at all. It barely looks like it interfaces with the sidewalk at all. Like many Calgary modern monstrosities, people and the pedestrian realm are an afterthought - though I guess it was nice the back side of the spaceship has picnic tables, apparently?
From an environmental point of view, these types of buildings also face three huge problems:
Embedded energy cost in the materials
Energy cost of daily use
Short useful life and inability to repair / retrofit
Glass and steel takes an enormous amount of energy to make, especially at these sizes. (Plus, we’re kind of running out of the right kind of sand to make glass.) It isn’t being done locally, so there’s a carbon footprint in trucking materials to a factory, and then from the factory to the site.
Glass is terrible for energy efficiency. Given this building’s south-facing orientation, it’s going to get a HUGE amount of sunlight all summer. This will invoke a huge cost for cooling. They’re not even using LEED-style fixed metal shades to block it out! And even with modern glazing, in Calgary’s occasionally -40C winters, heat escapes much more easily, compared to well-insulated walls.
In our very recent post-WWII history of construction, the average lifespan of a building like this is a scant 60 years, compared to a traditional stone, brick or wood building that averages out at 120 years (note: the Coliseum and Parthenon, still standing after 2000+ years). They are built with relatively new materials like sheetrock (yes, it’s kinda new) that are complex to manufacture and may not always be available, compared to local natural materials, and over time they age particularly badly (with some exceptions). Worst case: Some uncalculated thermal expansion makes a window pop out and flattens someone walking by. MIT’s Stata Center, by Frank Gehry, was falling apart just a couple of years after being built, with its complicated funhouse walls, titanium cladding, pointy bits jutting over the street, etc... and they sued him. His response? His buildings aren’t designed to last. He doesn’t care. A certain local bloggity blog person tweeted “Well, we’re lucky to have such a good design!” I say, in what universe is this a good design? Shouldn’t we insist on the best design, a design that will outlast our grandchildren, that solidifies instead of fragments the streetscape, that saves energy and will be repairable and maintainable in 200 years in the Post Whatever World? And that embodies and ennobles us by respecting human dignity, and echoing the human proportion, uplifting us?
Architects need to actually talk to people. The majority of people, when asked their preference, prefer classical designs by a wide margin over postwar designs. Having grown up in a city shaped by classical proportions, we accommodate the occasional modern buildings mixed into traditional neighborhoods, when they are of the same scale and aren’t too offensive.
This is not the same scale; it’s a building that says LOOK AT ME, rudely, instead of doing the polite thing and trying to fit in. It’s still possible to be expressive within traditional bounds - even fun and innovative - but this isn’t it.
