Calgary Architecture: The Boom Years 1972-1982

William T. Perks was Professor of Urbanism and Planning, Faculty of Environmental Design, University of Calgary.

Calgary has survived several incidences of boom years since its founding just over a hundred years ago. The Guimond-Sinclair book documents 133 buildings designed during the most recent boom. What stands out is the monumental scale of downtown construction, complemented by the eradication of historical street level environments. The new buildings present a sense of concentrated largeness. The over-reaching modernist eccentricity of it all seeks, as it were, to rival the ambitions and tastes of Toronto, even though Calgary has its own, distinguishing stylistic roots and is but a quarter of Toronto’s size in population if not in its commercial importance. The images in this book are evocative: one can see the twin forces of entrepreneurial licence and sleek, “me-too” architectural expression, frozen as if in an exhibition of the modernist movement’s thanatotic phase. One legacy of the first of these forces is today’s million square feet of vacant rentable space in Calgary. Legacies of both include a melange of rectangular, octagonal, curvilinear, and pyramidal site developments, all of them tall, some taller, a number of them exceeding 200,000 square meters of built space. Polished claddings vie for attention in their unending variety. Many designs sanctify the decorative glass atrium while the building design turns away from the street to deny sensual decoration where people walk, the eye-level field where architecture is customarily (and foremost) experienced by the public.

If the development of a distinguishable Calgary character was wanting in this period, it is not only because of modernist design. It has something to do as well with the fact that so many of the major projects among the 43 business/office buildings were designed by Toronto firms. As Toronto capital flows, so goes our high prairie design culture. And many of the local Calgary design firms who did manage to capture a slice of the boomwork seemed eager to emulate Toronto style.

Calgary Architecture is not a book of criticism. Nor is it about architectural appreciation in a meaningful sense of the term. It is, however, a concise, well-composed catalogue of design projects — 110 built (42 of them high rise and 68 low rise), and 23 projects yet to be built. Each project is documented in two pages or less. A uniform format is employed: photograph; an illustrative drawing of floor plan, section, or site plan; the identity of owners, architects, and building contractors; dates of design and construction; space measures. A few descriptive paragraphs, together with an explication of the design concept and the “challenges” and “responses” experienced by the designers, accompany the data and pictorial images. Many of the more interesting building designs appear within the “Residential,” “Industrial,” and “Public Institutional” categories. Among these the reader will be able to glimpse something of an embryonic Calgaryarchitectural idiom, although it is equally apparent that post-modernist dalliances are gaining favour among a new generation of Calgary architects.

This book is a good, needed, cross-sectional compendium, a useful reference for students of architecture and the casually interested person alike. The title would be more accurate if it were “Architecture In Calgary.”