While most new public art flies under the radar, every once in a while a piece of public art is hated by almost everyone. Think “Travelling Light” (a.k.a. the giant blue ring) and “Bowfort Towers” (rocks and girders) in Calgary, or “Talus Dome” (the pile of chrome balls) in Edmonton. Whenever a controversial piece of art goes up, immediately anti-public-art advocates ask, “How did that piece get chosen?”

In most cases the process in Alberta for choosing public art is complex. It involves inviting artists to submit a CV, some past project documentation and a letter of interest. Then someone from the commissioning government chooses people to be on the jury, usually a couple of art professionals (artists, curators, gallery directors or art writers), a city representative and a couple of people from the community at large.

The jury reviews the submissions and narrows it down to three or four artists who may visit the site, meet with stakeholders (sometimes the community) and then submit a detailed proposal. Sometimes these are shared with the public at an open house, sometimes not. The jury is then reconvened and asked to pick one of the proposals.

I propose that cities streamline public art programs by engaging a Public Art Curator to choose the artwork. The curator would consult the community, city professionals and politicians, but ultimately it would be their decision as to what art goes where. The Public Art Curator would replace the current Public Art Coordinator (or some similar title) who, while typically having some art background, doesn’t have the same credentials and contacts in the arts community to identify and choose appropriate artists.

The curator would research the site, meet with the community, understand the existing sense of place and how it might be enhanced with a piece of public art in a more rigorous manner than a jury would. Often jurors haven’t visited the site or met with the community.

Another weakness of the jury system is that even if no proposal is appropriate, the jurors feel obliged to select a couple of artists for the next step. In theory they don’t have to choose any of the proposed artworks—in reality they always do.

Even with a Public Art Curator you’re never going to make everyone happy. But if you want to build a great public art collection you need a vision and a champion, which the curator would be. Currently each public art piece is a separate project with no connectivity and synergies between works. Nobody takes ownership and accountability for the art chosen. When a piece is controversial, everyone says “The process and guidelines were followed” or “The jury made the decision.”

Cities would also save money, as you wouldn’t have juror fees (typically an honorarium) or the cost of flying and hosting three or four artists for every sculpture competition to see the site and meet stakeholders.

Ciara McKeown, public art curator, director, commissioner and project manager says, involve the public.

The question highlights a fundamental issue in the perception and understanding of public art—that everything is about a final outcome; typically, a permanent object. It assumes that the artwork’s selection is more important than the process by which the art comes to exist and what it contributes during its lifespan. Art is a process. It is a question, a provocation, a revelation and an opportunity to understand and see something differently in a particular context over time.

To consider the process rather than the selection illuminates a broader picture. Most municipal public art programs commit 1 per cent of eligible capital costs to public art. The artwork must be sited on or in proximity to the infrastructure or development. These limits, strict procurement procedures and the nature of the city’s acquiring a permanent asset determine the commission’s parameters, narrowing artists’ possibilities from the outset. But if we rethink the process, the question would be not about how to select art but why we’re doing it. And that needs a new answer.

We can rethink the approach by reframing public art as a chance to consider place, context and meaning rather than as “decorative” design or an “enhancement” that fulfills a policy. Answering “Why public art?” with the expertise artists bring to the conversation invites new perspective. Artists can make more meaningful contributions when each public art opportunity is approached with discernment and critical thinking, including questioning if public art is the right thing for the particular situation. Commissions must begin with a willingness to take risks, experiment and connect to the public art program’s overall vision and collection. No project stands alone.

An artist needs time to get to know a place and the context of the commission. Longer timelines allow for consideration of the artwork’s lifespan and for richer relationships between artists, publics and project teams. This is a slow process. Adaptability and flexibility are necessary for responsive public art.

How “public” is defined is crucial. It’s often not discussed between the artist, the municipality and its citizens but defined by the artwork’s location, with a “community” identified around that. “Community” can mean many things and change with each context and over time. Who gets to speak for that community How and why would you attempt to represent the views of an arbitrary group of people in one artwork Having relevant publics be defined by and work with the artist throughout the process would create meaningful connections.

The best public art engages the artist from the start. They’re respected, contribute equally, have agency to be creative and shape the process and project just as other professionals do (engineers, architects, designers etc.). When an artist isn’t seen as a miraculous social saviour or a mere “enhancer” of what’s already completed, new possibilities emerge. Otherwise the outcome is predetermined, imposed and often misses the mark.

Richard White responds to Ciara McKeown. 

No matter who chooses public art, they must be cognizant of what the final product will look like and how it will be received by the various public(s). Indeed, the public is very heterogeneous. In the 1980s Duncan Cameron, president and CEO of the Glenbow, said we should pluralize the word public given the diversity of people it represents.

While public art doesn’t have to appeal to everyone, it should have some broad-based appeal, as it is being placed in a public space and paid for with taxpayer dollars. The art can be controversial as long as the dialogue it creates is constructive—not about how the art is meaningless or how much it cost. The art should have almost an equal number of people who like it, love it and hate it.

From the public’s perspective public art is about the product, not the process. The art suddenly appears on a bridge, on the side of a highway, in a plaza or park. The majority don’t care how it was created or chosen; they just want public art to enhance their urban experience.

A telling example is Calgary’s “Travelling Light,” a.k.a. Giant Blue Ring. The vast majority of Calgarians don’t know or care what the piece’s real title is. When I share with them some of the underlying meanings and symbolism they just shrug and say “I still don’t get it.” The piece has been too tainted by the early debate about a “meaningless” blue circle, on a bridge, in the middle of nowhere.

The City of Calgary’s website doesn’t help. “The sculpture represents the most iconic symbol of movement, the wheel,” it reads. “The arches of the street lamps rise from the apex, clearly and unequivocally anchoring the sculpture, while at the same time evoking the notion of constant movement. This dual meaning is reflective of the character of a bridge—a fixed, connecting location that serves movement and travel…The radiant colour refers to the sky, which is always in the background, and contrasts with the bridge’s other functional elements.”

Does anybody really get this from looking at the piece as you drive by in a couple of seconds or see it from a distance?

Now look at “Wonderland,” a.k.a. Giant Head, by Jaume Plensa, on the plaza in front of Calgary’s Bow building. Again, the public doesn’t care that it was chosen by a seven-member jury or that it has 12,000 intersections connected with saddle welds or that the artist is Spanish. They see a giant ghost-like head that you can wander inside, which you can’t help but do when you visit. The art engages the public. It makes them wonder in different ways about the human experience. What goes on inside our heads The piece was immediately well received.

The same is true about the art in Edmonton’s Borden Park, especially “Willows,” by Marc Fornes. The piece looks intriguing and invites you to walk inside.

One of Calgary’s most successful pieces of public art is “By The Banks of the Bow,” by Bob Spaith and Rich Roenish, which depicts 15 bronze horses and two cowboys crossing the Bow River. At Stampede time the sculpture becomes a huge playground, as families climb on the horses, use it as a meeting place, and are at the same time subtly reminded of our ranching and pioneering history.

I disagree that “no project stands alone.” In fact, all public artworks must stand alone, as in most cases they aren’t installed side-by-side like at an art gallery or an art park—they are kilometres apart and the public will experience them months, perhaps years apart.

Choosing good public art is about choosing a work that engages the maximum number of people not only today but for generations. It must have a timeless quality. Public art must engage the public before it can educate or enlighten them.

If an artwork is immediately dismissed by most who see it, then it’s a failure. Whoever chooses public art must consider its immediate visual impact. It must capture people’s imagination and stimulate their curiosity to continue looking. Only then will the public think about the possible meanings. Only then will they be enticed to move around the piece to explore its different angles.

I agree we often expect too much of public art. Rarely can it transform an ugly or banal public space into something wonderful, or make driving a busy highway an enlightening experience. In fact, much of Alberta’s controversial public art is along highways, which are poor sites for public art.

Choosing public art is complex. It’s not a science. Mistakes will sometimes be made, no matter who chooses the art. Most art professionals on public art juries and the artists themselves have little understanding of how the average citizen experiences and thinks about public art. An out-of-town artist might meet with the community and see the site once or twice, but a true understanding only comes with longer-term engagement with the community and how it interacts with the site.

That’s where a curator can help, understanding the community’s and city’s sense of place. They can learn from past successes and failures and provide continuity.

Most don’t care how public art was created or chosen; they just want it to enhance their urban experience.

Ciara McKeown responds to Richard White.

Although I agree with some of Richard’s points, I wholeheartedly disagree with his characterization of “Travelling Light” and “Bowfort Towers.” “Travelling Light” is an easy target on a thoroughfare not of the artist’s choosing and was unveiled in an election season. “Bowfort Towers,” in particular its location on Paskapoo Slopes, symbolizes the need for nuanced, ongoing conversations about public art and civic space, especially with Indigenous peoples.

How can a claim be made that “almost everyone” has a certain opinion, and how is this determined How do we define “controversy” Is blaming two projects and the artists behind them for a general lack of awareness of civic processes fair It’s important to consider how public art is characterized in our conservative media climate, one almost devoid of well researched, critical discourse about public art. Recent issues in Calgary public art are part of larger systemic/structural problems: the way contemporary art is underfunded, misunderstood, unsupported and shrouded by mistrust.

Richard argues a public art curator would select more appropriate locations and address a lack of ownership and accountability in the selection process. But no one should be solely accountable or responsible for a public art program; the name implies communal stewardship. Municipalities must actively support and advocate for the public art process, policy, decision making and expertise of program staff, commissioned artists, external consultants, etc., and we all need to own it.

A fundamental issue is how we communicate about the artist, their process and the artwork. A thorough communications strategy understands the artist’s approach from beginning to end, rather than focusing on the finished art object in the designated location. Many public art criticisms are sparked by how we articulate the work to different audiences, how we don’t effectively engage people throughout the process. Ownership isn’t about checking a box or “liking” something; it’s about sharing in the public art process and civic discourse. A public art collection is built in perpetuity for people of a place, so people must be part of the whole journey.

A curatorial perspective could add a lot to a public art commissioning process, but not all curators are equal. A public art curator must bring a critical perspective to the art and artist and situate the process within broader contemporary art histories. She has an understanding of and interest in the public realm, a curiosity about systems, diverse cultures, histories and the changing dynamics of urban spaces. A public art curator desires respectful reciprocal relationships rather than a predetermined outcome. All of this takes time, context, sensitivity, strategic thinking, planning and bureaucratic finesse. Public art has a history. It involves site-based commissioning, material and conservation knowledge, collections management, etc.

Richard’s blanket replacement of public art program staff with a curator makes a lot of assumptions. We need to be careful about simply exchanging one expertise for another. If the program is to fulfill a mission, then it should hire to build a great public art collection by seeking very particular expertise specific to the context.

Every public art program is different, every artist works differently, each situational context is unique. So each commission needs its own approach, constructed in response to the specifics. If the process happens in the same way each time for every project, we assume we’ll be more transparent, accountable and better understood. But this blatantly disregards how artists work, how the art ecosystem functions and why we even commission public art in the first place. Consistency can be helped by thorough communications at every stage of the project. Creating dialogue about the artist and the process through varied means with specific and defined audiences rather than channelling generalized messages to homogeneous “communities” is part of building lasting understanding, knowledge and most importantly, trust.

Juror fees aren’t a cost but an investment. Best practice in the arts includes a critical peer-review process—a small price considering the gravity of the task. I agree with Richard that jurors need more knowledge and understanding of the project. This actually requires a more dedicated involvement, so that they’re coming from an informed place. Learning about the land and its many histories is also critical to understanding how an artist’s process would be situated in that place. Jurors must truly understand the artist’s perspective and practice and how she intends the work to live in the place, how it might evolve over time.

I hope we want more from public art than to “enhance” a place. This instrumentalizes art and artists to merely decorate. As much public art demonstrates, we can learn a lot from artists and the ways they understand the world. Decorating doesn’t do much for a place. But bringing in new ideas and ways of thinking and building meaningful relationships between people and artists does. Let’s aim higher.

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The post How Should Public Art Be Chosen? appeared first on Alberta Views.

Any recent library user knows it’s been ages since libraries simply offered what Bill Ptacek, CEO of the Calgary Public Library, calls “just buildings with a bunch of books.” He recognizes that “if that’s what we are, we’d have been extinct years ago.” Today’s library has become “a community centre on steroids,” in the words of Michael Brown, the president and CEO of the Calgary Municipal Land Corporation (which played a large role in making the new Calgary building possible). Local libraries have begun to redefine their mission as supporting the multiple literacies essential to any functional 21st century citizen: financial, health, cultural and media literacy.

To see what this looks like in practice, and what difference it might be making to Albertans, I took a little library road trip in fall 2018.

You enter Edmonton’s downtown public library—in the temporary space it’s using until 2020— through Enterprise Square on Jasper Avenue. Inside, the swirl of activity sums up the glories and challenges of a truly inclusive urban space, and the abstract concept of multiple literacies takes obvious, concrete form.

Through a small window you can see a patron in headphones recording electric bass in a studio available to the public. You press yourself against the wall to make way for tightly managed herds of schoolchildren who parade past banks of computers where slouching Edmontonians scroll through job ads, play games and check email. Some mutter to themselves, others sway intently to earbud music. One kid-herd enters a glass-walled play space for reading time; another follows a tour of the whole library. Bright lime-green robots scattered on the floor await programming from other kids in coding workshops. Oblivious to the 40 or so children a few metres away, another musician works with audio-editing software, headphones clamped over her ears. Library staff help a customer log in to video games at a dedicated terminal, while digital librarian Holly Arnason of the library’s MakerSpace shows me things people have made with the library’s 3D printer, vinyl cutter and one-stop book-printing-and-binding machine.

When did the library become a workshop or an art and music studio As Ptacek put it: “The idea that you can create stuff in the library is a new thing. The idea of coming to a place where you don’t have to spend any money to learn how to use these state-of-the-art technologies—I think that’s what a library should be all about.” It’s certainly happening on Jasper Avenue. But what are libraries in smaller centres doing?

Just a short drive south, but far from the everything-at-once urban buzz of a downtown library, Lacombe’s Mary C. Moore public library fills up with mothers and kids on their way home in the late afternoon. In the central space, a long table holds platters of cookies—and we’re all invited to help ourselves! I’ve arrived in time for the annual Christmas baking contest, where adults and children judiciously nosh and comment. Some older patrons reading magazines nearby join in, and now it’s a three-generation cookie-fest. I ask some of the moms what—besides books and cookies—brings their families to the library. The answers include the armchair-travel speaker series (this winter includes Iraq, Afghanistan, India and the First and Second World War sites of the Lacombe Legion tour), the international film screenings, and all the online resources. Throughout my visit, behind a Do Not Disturb sign posted on the glass looking into the History Room, a highly concentrated young woman completes a university exam. If you take a distance education course you still need to write timed exams in a controlled space—public libraries provide that service too.

Compared to a big-city branch, Lacombe’s library seems very cozy and traditional. But it too works as a community centre serving multiple literacies. It plays a civic role of a physical town square in a time when so many “public” spaces have been privatized.

You see this contribution across the province: the Lethbridge main library branch’s recent renovation created a spacious community meeting room. As in so many European public libraries, Lethbridge also hosts social workers for part of each week, who can connect residents with mental health and addiction services, seniors services and so on.

In the downtown library’s main space, a wall covered with cotton shopping bags on hooks offers a financial literacy kit, a digital literacy kit or a book club kit (to help you start one up). To develop your physical literacy you can sign out basketballs, baseball kits, soccer balls, skipping ropes, horseshoes and lawn darts. But why, I ask the staff, do I see… a rubber chicken Silly question: It’s a “motivational throwing tool.” Anything to get patrons moving.

And there are snowshoes. I chat with local library user Nicola Wood, who explains her mixed feelings about borrowing snowshoes. Tramping around in the snow and cold was never her idea of fun. Still, she got out there to support her daughter’s curiosity about the sport. The experiment bore unexpected fruit when her daughter joined a group that’s now, aboard their very own snowshoes, helping conduct annual winter bird counts in the Crowsnest Pass. It’s an example of one form of literacy development leading to others—ecological and scientific, in this case. What’s more, it led one Lethbridge family to broaden their community connections.

This is not an isolated example. Another Lethbridge patron, Deanne Broderick, tells me how the library contributed to her life even before a library building existed in her part of town. As a new mother in West Lethbridge, she discovered that the public library housed children’s storytime programs in nearby senior citizens facilities, to the delight of the residents, the kids, and the mothers who needed to travel only a few minutes. Literacy-building turns into community connections once again. Deanne’s very earliest library experiences didn’t involve a building either. When she was 11 years old the highlight of her summers was the “old, stinky” school-bus bookmobile with its trove of Nancy Drews.

That bus full of books reflects the way libraries, for centuries, pursued their work of connecting, informing, teaching and supporting, mainly through print and cultivating print literacy. Today’s emphasis on fostering multiple literacies rests on another important motivation: removing barriers. Lethbridge library CEO Terra Plato can recite her mission statement to me from memory: “Lethbridge Public Library provides, preserves and promotes valuable resources, in a comfortable, welcoming place, where people of all ages can express their creativity, stimulate their imagination and satisfy their learning.” As she explains, “It’s all about making people more successful.” But which people All people—as she points out, you need not be a cardholder to use library space and resources. (You should still get a card, she insists, if only so you can revel in all the online material it provides access to, from music and film to instructional video and research databases.) “We’re one of the last truly open, available public spaces. We’re here to equalize the playing field for everybody,” she says.

Openness and inclusivity come with challenges. Plato notes that “as this very open public space, we were one of the first places to feel the impact of the opioid crisis. Lots of at-risk people spend time in the library.” For her this diversity of users is desirable: “We are here for everybody. We have standards of behaviour, but until they are breached, everybody’s welcome here.” (This policy has its critics: An online comment in the Calgary Herald called that city’s new library “the world’s most architecturally stunning homeless shelter.”)

This social-barrier-busting inclusiveness has never discouraged Nicola Wood from bringing her young children to the Lethbridge library. For them “it’s a safe public space where you can just hang out. I want my children to go out of the house. Get off their phones. Socialize. And this is an accessible space they can go to and do something good, cool, fun, interesting.” The family uses the library as a base from which to learn more about and get more involved in their own city. For instance, the Lethbridge Presents program provides library patrons with free tickets to concerts, basketball games and museums. As a result, says Nicola, “My kids can be more active and engaged in their community.”

By making community resources available for playful, barrier-free experiment—why not try the symphony if it’s free?—the library offers up the city’s cultural life for the kind of cost-free sampling and experimentation that happens when you randomly choose books from the shelf and discover a new favourite author. Facilitating these community connections benefits everyone, in part by creating a more resilient population: “People with connections to the community, who have something to do, are better able to cope with hard times,” argues Plato.

With these conversations in mind, I head back to Calgary for a good look at the new building—for now, the most celebrated and visible demonstration of the ongoing renewal of local public libraries’ mission. This includes embracing reconciliation as a fundamental part of libraries’ community role. One of the first things I notice in the new building’s soaring entrance is an enormous three-part mural by Keegan Starlight, Kalum Teke Dan and Roland Rollinmud. Raising my eyes past the mural, I find another of the library’s Indigenous placemaking elements, in the form of Lionel Peyachew’s buffalo sculpture composed of words from Indigenous languages. In the top-floor Elders’ Guidance Circle the furniture is by Glenna Cardinal, and on the wall a photo-text piece by Brittney Bear Hat addresses storytelling. Also on the top floor, Calgary’s inaugural Indigenous Languages Resource Centre builds on existing courses in Blackfoot, Michif and Cree, which local branches had already begun to offer in partnership with the city’s Aboriginal Friendship Centre.

“Being able to come into the library and share our stories—from Stoney, Tsuut’ina, Blackfoot… it’s an amazing step for Calgary.”
—Keegan Starlight

When I toured the library just before it opened in 2018, painter Starlight was making final touches to his section of the mural. He shared his own reaction to the new facility: “The inclusion we have now, being able to come into the library and share our stories—from Stoney, Tsuut’ina, Blackfoot… it’s an amazing step for Calgary. To have things like the Elders’ Guidance Circle; that’s where you see hope coming right back into the community.” Starlight, who is from Tsuut’ina, says his grandmother needed five languages to navigate her world, to make connections and learn what she needed. That learning took place face to face; it was spoken and heard. A “building with a bunch of books” could never have worked as a way of transferring and sharing that lived knowledge and wisdom.

In their own fashion, Alberta’s public libraries grasp that print literacy and solitary book-consultation now take their place within a constellation of multiple literacies and essential human exchange. Citizens need places to meet, to experiment freely with new ways of learning and creating, to gather and discuss and plan and decide. And while the visible architecture of our new “community centres on steroids” matters enormously, the less-visible human architecture of connections and increased capacities will form a more lasting gift from public libraries to their communities.

Harry Vandervlist, professor at the University of Calgary, has served on the editorial boards of U of C Press and NeWest Press.

The post The New Literacy appeared first on Alberta Views.

Catharine Robb grew up on an estate in a wealthy family in Concord, Massachusetts, daughter of Edith Morse and Russell Robb, a successful engineer and businessman. Arts, culture, community and philanthropy were a significant part of her education and upbringing.

Despite disparate lineages and locales, their interests in making art led Catharine and Peter to meet as fellow students at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Perhaps their differences—Peter, the outdoorsy, rural man, and Catharine, refined, cosmopolitan and stylish—were the attraction. In a journal entry from that time, cited in Chic Scott’s book Mountain Romantics: The Whytes of Banff, Catharine writes, “Pete is… a perfect, blue-eyed, innocent boy, kind and good, and ought to paint well some day. He has improved more than anyone else in the class.” They courted in the late 1920s, then married in Concord in 1930 and settled in Banff. By the time of their marriage they were using the “Whyte” spelling of Peter’s family name.

In 1931 Catharine and Peter built a home on a large family property between Banff’s main street—a wide dirt trail—and the Bow River. It was a log house with studios, constructed of pine and spruce cut in the Morley foothills east of town. From their house they looked across the glacier-fed Bow and through the trees to the mountains.

It wasn’t in their minds then, but by 1968 Catharine and Peter would endow an institution dedicated to art and community that would be built right next door to their rustic home. It would become known as The Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies, and in 2018 it celebrated its 50th anniversary.

Wa-Che-Yo-Cha-Pa—“Where the good, the wise and the beautiful come together in harmony.”

“Can you just imagine Peter and Catharine sitting in their log house thinking about what this would look like,” says Anne Ewen, current Museum Curator of Art and Heritage, “and then actually following through with the idea, creating this amazing museum for the people of Banff and for the world?”

That vision took hold in 1958 when Catharine and Peter created a foundation to gather resources to create an arts and culture centre. The foundation was named “Wa-Che-Yo-Cha-Pa” by their friend, Stoney band chief Walking Buffalo (George McLean). Catharine interpreted the name as “Where the good, the wise and the beautiful come together in harmony.” The foundation would be endowed through Catharine and Peter’s substantial financial assets and with their considerable collection of art and artifacts.

The Whytes’ early Banff days took them into the rugged mountain landscape with pencils, brushes, paints and easels to capture the magnificent terrain in all seasons. They were sometimes accompanied by other artists, including Belmore Browne, Nicholas de Grandmaison, Carl Rungius and Walter Phillips, who became resident artist at the Banff School of Fine Arts in 1940. Other visitors included Group of Seven members J.E.H. MacDonald, Lawren Harris, Arthur Lismer and A.Y. Jackson. A viewer can see, in some of the Whytes’ own paintings and drawings, the relationship of their work to the past and to the emerging style of the times. Their outdoor painting locations included their neighbouring landscapes such as at Lake O’Hara, Bow Lake and near Jasper. And they produced elegant portraits of Stoney Nakoda friends.

“Peter and Catharine were excellent painters,” says Anne Ewen. “We have [in the Museum collection] over 1,000 of their drawings and paintings. Their artwork was as good as the Group of Seven in some instances. The work they did when they were at the Boston Museum School was brilliant. Their drawings were phenomenal. Their portraiture is exquisite. They had training that prepared them for the challenges they would meet, whether painting in the mountains or working in the studio.”

Some 140 of the Whyte’s works have been on display at the Whyte Museum this summer and early fall in the exhibition “Artistry Revealed: Peter Whyte, Catharine Robb Whyte and Their Contemporaries.” The show is entirely drawn from the Whyte’s collection and also includes 29 images by their contemporaries—painters Rungius, MacDonald and A.C. Leighton among them.

Complementing the exhibition is a book with over 100 images—paintings and sketches by Peter and Catharine and others. A smattering of photographs capture the couple in their beloved mountain terrain. The text includes an introduction by Anne Ewen, close “readings” of many paintings by art historian Monique Westra and an essay on the legacy of Peter and Catharine by writer Lisa Christensen.

The Whytes produced work of extraordinary quality and volume. But artists aren’t always the best promoters.

The works in the exhibition are distinctive. Peter’s Athabasca Glacier, chosen for the show’s title wall and also for the book cover, is a gorgeous image. A gnarly, witchy, ancient tree in blacks and browns dominates the foreground to the left of the frame, and the centred glacier—a river of ice, white and blue—seems to flow toward the viewer. Catharine’s larches, as in Mount Temple and Larches, glow a golden yellow and dance against a radiant blue sky. And her portraits capture character and depth from her subjects, whether Peter’s uncle John Donaldson Curren or Dan Wildman, a Stoney friend resplendent in headdress and bear teeth necklace.

Peter’s large painting (74 cm × 165 cm) Untitled (Stoney Encampment) stands out, with its high plains panoramic width, the 20 tipis circling into the distance and back, its colours ranging from reds to greys through a many-hued palette. It offers a glimpse into what appears to be a tranquil social gathering of resident Indigenous people in a flat green field with mountains jagging the distant horizon, an image from another time.

In her essay Christensen asks, “So why, today, is their work largely unknown outside of Banff and generally unrecognized within the art world?” The Whytes produced an extraordinary volume and quality of work and were well connected—but artists are not always the best promoters of their own work. Perhaps, because of Catharine’s wealth, there was no pressing need to pursue sales. Maybe modesty was a factor.

As well, Peter and Catharine had interests outside their art making: Peter loved to ski and photograph; Catharine was a gracious host and community builder. People would often drop by their home and she would interrupt her painting to make tea and be hospitable. They welcomed friends, family, fellow artists, skiers, guides and Stoney Nakoda citizens. Their log house can still be visited and toured on the Whyte Museum property. For whatever reason, the most focused appreciation of their work remains predominantly in Banff.

The celebratory exhibition received a National Museum Assistance Program grant that enabled restoration of some paintings, new frames for others, digital interpretation included in the exhibition, and the book. “[The grant was] a way of validating that this is a really important project,” says museum director Vincent Varga, “and it is a game changer for this institution to get this kind of funding. Peter and Catharine deserve that kind of recognition.”

Sadly Peter passed away in 1966 before seeing the construction of the Whyte Museum. Catharine, going on alone, rolled up her sleeves and pushed the foundation’s plan forward. In a 1967 ceremony she wielded the shovel that broke the soil, and in 1968 the Whyte building opened, containing a gallery, a library and an historical archive.

Catharine’s close friend and ski coach in the years after Peter’s passing, photographer Roy Andersen, attended the opening. He remembers Catharine well.

“She loved her home, her cabin, she loved the mountains. She supported Peter and his painting and she sacrificed her own time. She was always a lady, and never lost her Boston, New England accent. She was humble and appreciative and so polite.” These qualities attracted people to her—local citizens and individuals in high places.

“We knew that Catharine had a good relationship with Pierre Elliott Trudeau,” says Anne Ewen, who, during her first stint working at the Whyte in the late 1970s had come to know Catharine. “I was her guest when she received the Order of Canada, and we were standing in the middle of the room at the reception and he came running over and said to her ‘I’m not here all evening, but I knew you were in town so I just thought I’d come over and say hello.’”

The Trudeau story does not end there, as Ewen recounts: “We were working in the archive one weekend. We found three boxes, labelled the ‘fugitive boxes,’ and in them we found a lovely letter from Margaret Trudeau thanking Catharine for the tour, for showing her their garden, that it was a lovely house and that she’d love to have a log house sometime in her life.”

They found another note, a formal invitation for July 5, 1973, inviting Catharine to have lunch with Pierre and Margaret along with Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip at the Palliser. “Yet Catharine never fawned over important people,” says Ewen. “She always looked for good qualities in people. She treated everyone the same.”

Today at the entrance to the “Artistry Revealed” exhibition there hangs a framed letter from Justin Trudeau congratulating the Whyte—an institution founded before he was born—on its anniversary.

The existing collection holds more than 6,000 paintings, drawings and historical items concisely listed in Chic Scott’s book: “In the archives can be found 1,300 motion pictures, 1,100 sound recordings, 225 linear metres of textual records, 5,500 books and about half a million photographs.” And the heritage collection contains objects as diverse as packer boxes and a saddle from the days when horses were used to explore the backcountry; a guide’s 1896 Enfield rifle; First Nations buckskin jackets and beaded moccasins; CPR silverware; an 18th century Japanese ceremonial sword; even a helicopter.

Such a rich cultural repository has many functions in a place like Banff, a town in a national park, population close to 9,000, which draws four million tourists annually. As Varga says, “Contemporary museums are a destination, they’re a cultural hub, they serve the community and a tourist population. A huge percentage of visitors come here to see the mountains. How can we more effectively reach out to those people so that when they get here they want to come to the museum We’re very fortunate that we have the Peter and Catharine Whyte Foundation, and Banff being the kind of economy that it is. If it were a community of 9,000 anywhere other than in a place like this, it would be darn tough.”

Peter and Catharine Whyte could not have envisioned the Banff of today—the myriad hotels, the pricey local and chain restaurants, the ubiquitous souvenir shops, the summer traffic jams of cars, buses and motorhomes. Nor could they have foreseen the expanded building and complex program of exhibitions, talks, tours and other activities that occur at the Whyte Museum year round. Amid such growth, the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies and those connected with it strive to fulfill and further the vision of Catharine and Peter—that of “Wa-Che-Yo-Cha-Pa—where the good, the wise and the beautiful come together in harmony.”

Steven Ross Smith is the 2018–2019 Banff Poet Laureate and is known for his fluttertongue poems.

The post Born in Romance appeared first on Alberta Views.

The much-needed space was one of five new facilities to open in Calgary in the last 18 months as the result of an initiative called the Cultural Space Investment Process (CSIP). A 2007 inventory had found that Calgary’s major arts facilities were at capacity, with the city having fewer purpose-built visual and performing arts spaces overall (and fewer seats per capita) than Edmonton, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Austin or Seattle. The number of performance-space seats per capita had fallen 25 per cent in the previous two decades. Calgary Arts Development (CADA) and the City of Calgary created CSIP to evaluate projects and make funding recommendations. In 2008 the City designated 5 per cent, or $165-million, of Municipal Sustainability Initiative (MSI) funding it would receive from the province over 10 years to culture-related infrastructure.

Dance space was one of the priorities. Calgary is home to two major dance companies, Alberta Ballet and DJD, a degree program in dance at the University of Calgary and the international Fluid Fest presented by Springboard Dance. The number of dance organizations and attendance at performances has been rising, but growth has been hampered by the shortage of affordable and appropriate space—dance is a physical art form that requires sprung floors, good ventilation and open areas without pillars.

A professional dance company founded in 1984, DJD has 60 original productions under its belt as well as thousands of students of all ages, including some with Parkinson’s disease. But its old space on 4th Street SW was accessed by a narrow stairway. It had chips in the walls, desks so old they weren’t designed for computers, a costume room that looked like an overstuffed closet, and a dim and dingy changing room with repurposed lockers. The only bright spot was a hallway lined with framed DJD show posters illustrating the company’s long history. Executive director Kathi Sundstrom says the company was saving every spare dollar for what became a 10-year effort to build the new $26-million centre.

As of 2005 DJD’s rent was doubling every five years, she recalls, but the company couldn’t boost its revenue because the studios were heavily booked. Sundstrom says DJD supported artists—whether from the company or the community—by allowing them to use the studios for creative and rehearsal space whenever they were empty. “They often had to come after hours and late at night because that was the only time we had available,” she says.

The company decided it needed a philanthropic partner for a landlord. The Kahanoff Foundation, which provided affordable office space for non-profit organizations, became that partner. When the economy faltered in 2008, so did the plan. In 2012 the Kahanoff turned its assets over to the Calgary Foundation, and a new plan was hatched to create space for DJD on the first five floors of a new 12-storey build-ing next door to the Kahanoff Centre on 12th Avenue SE, with additional office space for non-profit organizations above.

DJD studios were heavily booked. Dancers “often had to come late at night because that was the only time we had available.”

The DJD Dance Centre received $5.5-million in cultural MSI funding through the city, with the rest coming from the Calgary Foundation, provincial and federal governments and private donors. The project broke ground in April 2014. When DJD moved in two years later, the company went from having 10,000 ft2 with three studios to just under 40,000 ft2 and seven studios—including one that converts into a 230-seat theatre. “We’ve never before been able to create a show in the same space it’s going to be performed in,” Sundstrom says.

New Universe, the title of the first show at the new DJD Dance Centre, was fitting—the space is nothing like the company’s former cramped quarters. Bright and spacious, it’s filled with natural light from the wall of windows on the north side of each floor that offer views of downtown from the inside and a glimpse of the action in the studios from the outside. The cityscape will provide a backdrop for some performances, but the theatre also converts into a black box. Behind the scenes is a large costume room and locker rooms with plenty of lights and mirrors. Participants in the Dancing Parkinson’s YYC classes can now access studios from an elevator on the main floor.

The new centre allows DJD to create more shows per season, each with a longer run. They can also double the number of classes to 80 and rent out studio and performance space to other organizations. “Dance has been one of those disciplines in the city that just didn’t have the appropriate space,” says CADA president and CEO Patti Pon. “The new DJD space gives recognition to their legitimacy as a dance company.”

In the last year and a half, four other high-profile facilities recommended for cultural MSI funding opened in Calgary: MRU’s Taylor Centre for the Performing Arts, including the 787-seat Bella Concert Hall; the National Music Centre in the East Village; the 85,000 ft2 Calgary Film Centre in the southeast; and the first phase of cSPACE King Edward arts incubator, a work in progress. “All of the spaces are stunning,” says Pon. “It feels like a culmination because now you’re starting to see a critical mass of these openings. We’re seeing the benefit of almost 10 years into a strategy.”

The Centennial Planetarium, recognized for its brutalist architecture, was built in 1967. (photo: Richard White)

Unlike the new facilities, cSPACE King Edward is a century-old sandstone school in South Calgary that is being transformed into an “arts incubator,” with offices, studios and exhibition space for artists, arts organizations and non-profits. cSPACE is part of an initiative started in 2011 by CADA in partnership with the Calgary Foundation to make room outside the city centre for emerging and established artists alike in a multitude of genres. The plan is to retrofit existing buildings in inner-city neighbourhoods to develop a network of affordable, sustainable, multi-tenant workspaces across Calgary.

Pon says the program will encourage graduates coming out of arts programs at the Alberta College of Art + Design, the
U of C and Mount Royal University to stay in the city. “What are we doing to keep them?” she asks. “Creating space literally and figuratively for emerging artists is really important.”

Reid Henry, president and chief executive of cSPACE, describes the project as a “social enterprise” and strategic response to the need for arts and cultural space. cSPACE King Edward—the first project to launch under that larger program—is a 47,000-ft2 facility complete with an outdoor sculpture garden. The building has rental units as small as 250 ft2 and as big as 830 ft2 that can be used for offices, studios, exhibitions and rehearsal space. Reid says King Edward will not only provide space for artists to work and interact but for the community to gather. The project received approval for $5-million in cultural MSI funding through the city in 2011 and another $1.5-million in 2015.

The first phase of the project was completed in December 2016 and the first tenants arrived in January. The second phase, slated for completion by fall 2017, is the addition of a modern west wing with space that can be rented for revenue to help cover King Edward’s operating costs—meeting rooms, co-working space for freelancers or tenants who need occasional extra space, event space and a 125-seat theatre. The old three-storey building’s character has remained intact. The wide corridors are flanked by classrooms that feature the original blackboards and mouldings. In several areas, sections of original brick are left exposed. Large windows on the north side provide natural light as well as views of downtown. Beneath the surface are many changes. The building now meets LEED Gold standards for energy efficiency, walls have been reinforced for hanging artwork, the wiring and heating have been updated and hallway lighting can be adapted for different uses, including highlighting or projecting artwork.

The smallest spaces are found in the “hive” on the top floor, where the attic has been turned into studios for working artists. One of those artists, Arkatyiis Miller, was giddy when she first saw hers. A graduate of ACAD, she needed an affordable space to create her large, abstract conceptual drawings, and the idea of interacting with other artists in the same building appealed. “I want to do something really, really grand and there just isn’t space to do it anywhere else,” she says. “It’s perfect for me in every way.”

Nikki Loach of Quest Theatre, another tenant, says she was drawn to King Edward not only because the space is subsidized and affordable but because it offers a sense of community. Quest Theatre, Loach says, looks forward to working with its new neighbour, the Making Treaty 7 Cultural Society, which has an office in the building and will share rehearsal space.

The project has not been without hurdles. To help offset the cost of the land purchase and renovation, a portion of the school site was to be sold to a developer for affordable live–work artists housing. The $33.5-million budget was higher than expected and funding came in slower than anticipated. Construction was delayed and the original plan had to be revised. Instead of artist housing, the residential portion of the site will now include seniors housing on the east side and luxury condos on the west. Meanwhile, some of the arts organizations that initially wanted to become tenants made other arrangements.

Quickdraw Animation Society was interested in cSPACE King Edward at the outset, but executive director Peter Hemminger says they weren’t sure the building could meet their space or budget requirements. When the project was delayed, they couldn’t wait any longer. Quickdraw was on a month-to-month lease because their landlord planned to tear down the building and redevelop the site. Like DJD, Quickdraw didn’t want to invest money in a temporary space. In the meantime the 32-year-old organization was running classes in rooms with no flooring.

Public art museums are some of the most exciting and dynamic spaces being built these days.

The same economic downturn that delayed King Edward also delayed plans to tear down Quickdraw’s building. That bought some extra time, during which vacancy rates and affordability improved. The society recently moved to a space in Sunalta that has offices at the front and a warehouse at the back with the 12-foot clearance required for animation equipment. Quickdraw is now neighbours with other organizations that found affordable space: Truck Gallery, Beakerhead, Emmedia and three theatre companies—Ghost River, Green Fools and Calgary’s Young People’s Theatre—that came together to share a space they’ve named West Village Theatre.

As for cSPACE King Edward, the final list of 29 tenants includes a mix of emerging and established visual artists and designers, non-profit organizations and a preschool. The Maria Montessori Educational Centre for children age 19 months to 6 years will occupy the largest space in the building. The Alberta Craft Council, which operates a large public gallery in Edmonton, will open a long-awaited exhibition space in Calgary. Quest Theatre and Making Treaty 7 will be joined by the Forte Musical Theatre Guild and Theatre Encounter. Alliance Française, the Alexandra Writers’ Centre, the Alberta Magazine Publishers Association and the Calgary Association of Lifelong Learners will all rent office space.

Under CADA’s strategy, 450,000 ft2 of arts and cultural space has been added to the city centre and seating capacity has increased by more than 1,800. Joni Carroll, CADA’s arts spaces consultant, describes CSIP as a “small but mighty” tool that has helped projects attract further investment from provincial, federal and private sources. Combined, the projects have leveraged six times the MSI funding designated for cultural spaces, she says.

Nonetheless, gaps remain. Calgary’s 2007 inventory found that attendance at visual arts exhibitions was increasing exponentially, while at the same time Calgary still lacks a contemporary art museum. But progress is being made. In 2014 three visual arts organizations merged to form the new Contemporary Calgary in an effort to gain support for a bid to turn the Centennial Planetarium at the west end of downtown into a public gallery for contemporary and modern art. The building, recognized for its brutalist architecture, had been vacant since 2011 when the science centre moved.

Contemporary Calgary plans to turn the iconic building into a public gallery for modern and contemporary art. (photo: Grant Hutchinson)

In April 2016, two years after Contemporary Calgary won the bid for the planetarium, the city approved $24.5-million in cultural MSI funding for the organization. The money will help cover the cost of renovating a wing added to the original structure, previously the Creative Kids Museum, to operate as a “Temporary Contemporary” gallery. Director and CEO Pierre Arpin says the funding is a milestone that will enable Contemporary Calgary to move forward with its vision as soon as it has provincial approval and a lease from the city. “It’s such an iconic building and it’s great that we’re able to do something with it,” says Arpin. He adds that the building’s unique spaces will lend themselves to different contemporary art practices—from hanging artwork on the walls of the rotunda to projecting artwork onto the dome. “We don’t always have to work in boxes.”

The organization expects to move on site and open Temporary Contemporary in 2017—50 years after the Centennial Planetarium itself opened in 1967 for Canada’s 100th anniversary. Contemporary Calgary will run exhibitions at Temporary Contemporary while raising money for phase 2, which will bring the rest of the building up to code. The final phase involves installing specialized systems to control temperature and humidity in specific areas of the building—including the addition and the rotunda—so they meet the class A standards required to host international exhibitions. Arpin estimates renovations will be completed sometime in 2020 at a total cost of about $82.5-million—provided there are no surprises. “One of the challenges is we’re dealing with a historic structure,” he says. “We have to be very careful.”

Arpin says public cultural spaces like Contemporary Calgary have the potential to impact the way people interact with art and each other—from their first impression when they walk in the door to their viewing of the art itself. As a child growing up near Ottawa, he recalls his visits to the National Gallery and what are now the Museum of Nature and the Museum of History as “transformational.”

“Public art museums are some of the most exciting and dynamic spaces being built around the world these days. These spaces become magnets for people,” he says. “If we’re working well as civic leaders, if we’re able to provide our citizens with these great spaces… then we’re doing our jobs well.”

Maureen McNamee is an associate editor at Alberta Views.

The post Room to Create appeared first on Alberta Views.

Or take Ferguson’s observation of Edmonton’s signature library—the brutalist Stanley A. Milner sitting at the foot of its civic plaza. After a comedy tour, he returned to his Los Angeles studio and remarked during his opening monologue on the Late Late Show that it looked like a prison.

But no critique cut as deeply as the one from its last sitting mayor, Stephen Mandel, who declared something of a fatwa on bad architecture in 2005. During his second State of the City address he said, “Our tolerance for crap is now zero.” His decree would set in motion a series of changes within government that would transform Edmonton from the butt of jokes to a role model for higher design standards.

Following a drought of public infrastructure during the 1990s, the boom-time city spent hundreds of millions on libraries, rec centres and public art, but this time it was aided by stellar competition juries and requests for proposals of the highest quality. The City has opened tendering to all of Canada, sometimes the world, to get the best possible design for its dollars.

The signature library that Ferguson called a prison is going under the knife for a futurist makeover by Toronto’s five-time Governor General’s award winning firm Teeple Architects. Finished works include the playful Jasper Place Library, with its stunning unsupported, undulating roof (Vancouver’s Fast+Epp); the spectacular, angular Commonwealth Community Recreation Centre (Toronto’s MacLennan Jaunkalns Miller); and a carousel-inspired park pavilion (Toronto’s gh3) that Azure magazine called “Canada’s most impressive public washroom.” No more crap indeed.

On a Friday morning, architectural critic Trevor Boddy is driving around his former hometown with a camera around his neck. Ignoring angry horns behind him, he slows and stops for shots of his few remaining modernism favourites. “We all cheered from the sidelines,” Boddy, now Vancouver based, says of Mandel’s declaration and the subsequent shakeup. “The competitions meant it wasn’t the same good ol’ boys and golf buddies getting commissions.”

The quality of design in Edmonton is extraordinary; it’s become a normal way of doing business.

He parks the SUV across from the cool and curvy Art Gallery of Alberta, considered patient zero in Edmonton’s architectural reinvention. Although it was a provincial project, the 2006 international competition to re-envision the Edmonton Art Gallery attracted the likes of Zaha Hadid and Arthur Erickson. Moreover, it inspired locals to consider the value of architecture as never before. But it was not errorless. “So many things come down to management,” Boddy says as he steps outside. “And the way it was managed was bad. Bad brief, bad rules.” Instead of rewarding a design that added to an already impressive, albeit constrained and poorly insulated 1960s modernist museum, it’s widely rumoured that the gallery’s former director overruled the jury’s choice (Hadid) for what Boddy calls a “patronizing” Frank Gehry ripoff by Californian Randall Stout. “It’s one of the greatest scandals in the last decade of Canadian architecture,” he says while photographing the scene of the “crime.”

But at least it got Edmontonians talking—both inside and outside government.

The city promoted its principal urban designer, Carol Bélanger (pronounced “Carl”), to chief architect, letting him oversee virtually every new public project’s design. He was involved with every branch but transit. Bélanger, a stylish dresser with a lumberjack beard and a faint Québécois accent, is known for his unorthodox tastes. “Carol is a terrific buy for Edmonton,” says Boddy, “and in some ways I’m a big fan of what he’s done.”

Jasper Place Branch Library

Instead of prioritizing the bottom line, as is often the case for governments, Bélanger helped establish a point-ranking system that ensured quality above all else when considering commissions. Architectural firms lowballing a $90-million budget rec centre would be deducted as many points as firms exceeding the budget. A trade agreement allowing interprovincial commissioning on most local projects had opened the doors to the country’s most prestigious architects applying for commissions. “I don’t profess to be the best architect,” says Bélanger, “but that’s why I hire the best.”

Bélanger acknowledges his tendency to reward outsider firms for the majority of public works. His ranking system gives points for past experience with similar projects, something Edmonton’s smaller companies simply may not have. But Bélanger is unapologetic. “We’re just trying to get the best, and paying the same fee to all these firms.”

Dubbed the “Edmonton Model” by the Ordre des architectes du Québec, the city’s rapid architectural reinvention has admirers across Canada. “It’s an excellent model to emulate,” says Calgary city councillor Druh Farrell. She’s asking her administration and colleagues to shake up their design policies, which Farrell says favour utilitarianism and vandal-proofing over excellence. “The quality of design in everything [Edmonton] does is extraordinary and it’s become a normal way of doing business. That’s what we need.”

Bélanger and the Edmonton Model are earning national attention, says gh3 principal Pat Hanson. Since 2011, her firm has won five bids, including a wastewater control centre that in just about any other city would probably be a stout cement box. Instead it’s a sleek, glass-skinned rotunda that defies its utilitarianism and offers passers-by something to delight the eye. “These are important buildings,” says Hanson. “They set the kind of ambition for private buildings.”

Eleven years into Edmonton’s architectural reinvention, it’s unclear whether the private sector has that ambition. As great as the Edmonton Model is, it hasn’t yet inspired private developers, who over the boom years expanded Edmonton’s infamous uniformity and banality at breakneck speeds. There are exceptions, especially around downtown, currently undergoing the biggest construction boom since the 1970s, with condo developers helping turn a formerly derelict warehouse district into the pedestrian-friendly promenade, and a quilt of parking lots birthing the multi-billion-dollar “Ice District” for the Oilers, surrounded by glossy new retail and mixed-use towers. But by and large the city’s rapid growth has rolled out a red carpet for drab buildings and terrible urban design, with little quality control but for a single volunteer design committee established in the wake of Mandel’s declaration. “It’s time for the private sector to pick up the slack,” says Boddy.

The sentiment is shared by Shafraaz Kaba of Edmonton’s Manasc Isaac. The architect helped establish the Edmonton Design Committee and sat on it for its first five years, giving new developments—and city council—letters of support or non-support based on whether their plans upheld basic design and architectural principles. Although some will heed EDC’s feedback (e.g., “proposed workmanship and craftsmanship must be consistent with classical style”), many more dismiss it. The result is buildings only slightly more attractive than those from the decade before 2005. “They need sharper teeth,” says Kaba of the EDC. “The City doesn’t have enough bylaw officers to follow up with everything built.”

He chalks up the private sector’s mediocrity not to economics but to laziness and fear. Kaba’s recently completed Mosaic Centre—a 30,000 ft2 private office building in the deep-south subdivision Summerside—is an example of what can be achieved on a standard $10.5-million budget. Alberta’s first net-zero office, the colourful three-storey structure is as beautiful as it is green. But peer over the solar panels on its rooftop garden and one sees rapidly sprouting big-box stores and sprawling spec offices, many of which have supposedly passed the EDC’s sniff-test. “Everyone wants to do what they know or what they’ve done before, and [they] don’t want to take the new path, because it has more risk.”

Castle Downs Pavilion. (Raymond Chow)

When it comes to handling higher quality materials and unique designs, architects and their clients struggle to find the required expertise. “Some of the more strategic detailing that we have in our buildings requires that the contractor think outside the box,” says Pat Hanson of gh3. “That’s new for most contractors in Edmonton.” However, she says this has improved over the years and contractors are welcoming the chance to learn the new skills demanded by bolder buildings.

“We’ve done a good job of adapting to what the architectural community wants,” says Art Bundschuh of subcontractors Flynn Canada. A Flynn employee of 18 years, he’s managed glazing, roofing and steelwork at many of the city’s newest landmarks, including the Art Gallery of Alberta, Mill Woods library and forthcoming arena and Royal Alberta Museum. Flynn rode the learning curve in order to pull off these legacy projects. Before the city’s new architectural mandate, a typical local company project, Bundschuh says, would be a Sobeys.

Will we rob future generations of the city’s imperfect yet authentic architectural heritage?

One danger of the Edmonton Model is that makeovers such as the Milner’s rob future generations of the city’s imperfect yet authentic architectural heritage. Edmonton has the tendency to destroy dignified public buildings, as it did with the AGA. (Even Carol Bélanger recently applied to demolish his 1950s flat-roof home, a Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired building that’s been on the city’s heritage list for 20 years, in order to build three colourful postmodern houses.)

More scandalous than choosing Stout’s AGA design over Hadid’s, says Boddy, is that it erased what he considered to be the city’s finest building from the 1960s. Stark, monolithic and in disrepair as it was, the modern brutalist Edmonton Art Gallery was one of six buildings on Boddy’s list of lost or endangered masterworks identified in his 2007 essay for Capital Modern: Edmonton Architecture and Urban Design 1940–1969. Of those six, only one remains: the Stanley A. Milner library on the other side of the civic plaza.

He snaps a few shots of the AGA and turns in the direction of the boxy six-storey library. Although it has outgrown its interior—claustrophobically designed at a time when book storage, not community service, was the priority—the exterior, to him, is nicely scaled and finely detailed. Boddy is not against Stephen Teeple’s futuristic redesign, but the current library was important to his generation.

The irony of Edmonton’s gradual makeover is that brutalism, a once popular style that fell out of favour for a generation, is currently enjoying a comeback in architectural circles as retaliation against structural expressionism’s extravagance. How many decades will pass before Edmontonians tire of the latter’s showiness wonders Boddy. “Urban plastic surgery seldom results in enduring beauty.”

He lifts the camera to his eye, pulls focus and takes what’s likely his last photo of the library in its current form.

Omar Mouallem lives in Edmonton, where he writes and edits The Yards and sits on the boards of LitFest and Eighteen Bridges.

The post To Delight the Eye appeared first on Alberta Views.

“2016,” Mayor Nenshi told me, “will be the year of music in Calgary. Canada and the whole world will be casting a glance at the fantastic scene here, and the National Music Centre is here to nurture that.”

I met with Mosker late last year just outside the new building and found him in a hardhat, his suit pants tucked into work boots, ready to show me the place before it opens. He handed me a hardhat and we clumped up a set of temporary wooden steps into the building.

Inside, construction workers were still scouring the place, many of them calling out a good morning to us. A “soft opening” will take place during the Juno Awards in Calgary from March 28 to April 3, but the full opening has been pushed back to the summer.

The first place Mosker led me to was the performance space. It’s stunning—a small concert hall that made me feel like I was sitting inside the sound box of a violin. “This,” Mosker said, “is the heart and soul of Studio Bell. It’ll seat 300 but that’s just the beginning. When we open the wall at the back, the stage opens to the entire building.”

“That wall opens?”

“Retractable, at the flick of a switch. And when it’s open, this whole building will feel like a music festival.”

I followed him down to the stage and through a door into what you might call the lobby. Two elegant oblong staircases bracket the retractable stage wall, now closed, and in front of us a large space opened up. Light filtered down from skylights and the walls swept up like shards of glass, like icebergs.

“Wow,” I said. “What will this cost?”

Residencies will be not just for musicians but technicians, audio designers and recording engineers. “We want to build the future here.”

The National Music Centre itself is a public not-for-profit organization, but the funding for this building has come from a wide range of public and private sources. The name Studio Bell is part of a $10-million partnership with Bell Media. The federal government kicked in another $25-million through the New Building Canada Fund—a fund for infrastructure projects—and both Alberta and Calgary have committed funds to match that. The building, which sits on both sides of 4th Street SE, is joined by a spectacular bridge and will be literally and figuratively the gateway to Calgary’s East Village. The brand-new community of chic condo towers, cafes and pedestrian malls, even an island, was all planned to rise up at more or less the same time and replaces an old neighbourhood known for dive bars and seedy hotels.

“This has been 10 years in the planning,” said Mosker, “and we’re almost there.” The costs have been rising too. The price for just this building is set now at $191-million. Private donations from Coril Holdings—run by the philanthropist Mannix family—amount to millions. Dozens of others, including the Taylor family and ATB Financial, are also involved, and the funding is not yet complete. Nevertheless, once the building is finished the maintenance costs will be fully covered by admission fees (to be determined) and rentals on various parts of the facility.

Mosker is philosophical. “I know people will ask, Why Calgary Why should the National Music Centre be in Calgary There’s a sense here that Calgary has come of age. It was all in the timing. We have the Alberta Ballet doing pieces with k.d. lang and Sarah McLachlan. We have the Bow Building and the Peace Bridge. And now there’s the East Village. Everything was in place.”

“But why music?” I said.

“We saw a gap,” Mosker said. “Canada needed a national centre to show our musical place in the world. But we also knew that if we wanted to do this, we had to show the rest of Canada that we were serious. Not any building would do. We had to deliver something extraordinary, something of international quality.”

Next we crossed the lobby and entered a passageway leading to one of several galleries at the back. Mosker swept his hand around its bare walls. “We looked at a lot of models from around the world, but we knew we didn’t want this to be just a museum. We’ll have the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in one gallery and Innovations in another [which will feature things done first in Canada]. Twenty-one galleries in all.”

“Storytelling is the idea we keep coming back to,” he said. “But this isn’t about the past. This is about the future. There’ll be artist residencies here and not just for musicians. We’ll have residencies for technicians too, audio design, recording engineers. We want to build the future here. What will not change from the early Cantos days is the educational programs.”

The National Music Centre grew out of the Cantos Music Foundation, which itself had its roots in the installation of the pipe organ at the Jack Singer Concert Hall in time for the Winter Olympics in 1988. That instrument spawned an organ festival and the Cantos Music Museum, a collection of ancient keyboard instruments, later expanded into a private foundation with educational programs. Teachers brought their students down to the building on tours, and the instrument collection, items from all over the world, continued to grow.

“We still have classrooms on the other side,” said Mosker. “That’s not going to change.”

“I like the idea,” I said, “of a kid coming down here, and seeing all this and having that ‘wow’ moment. The idea that that kid will be the new Neil Young or Joni Mitchell or something beyond our imagining now.”

“Exactly,” he said. “Exactly.”

The King Eddy, built in 1905, was a beloved blues bar in a crumbling hotel slate for demolition. (George Webber)

We stepped out onto the bridge over 4th Street. “This is one of my favourite parts of the building,” Mosker said, stopping there, leaning on the handrail. The bridge is two full storeys above the street. The sun was shining in through a triangular window the size of a billboard. From windows in the bridge, we could see south to the Saddledome and north over the East Village towards the Bow River and St. Patrick’s Island.

“We’re going over now,” he said, “into the west part of the building and…”

I knew what was coming. One of the hallmarks of this project was that it would include, envelop really, the old King Eddy. The Eddy, built in 1905, was a beloved blues bar in a crumbling hotel. The hotel had been slated for demolition, and in some ways, saving it was the catalyst for this whole new building.

The Eddy was legendary. Muddy Waters’s band played there. B.B. King and Buddy Guy. All the greats. “We had to take the whole building apart, brick by brick,” said Mosker, “We did a full laser scan so we could put it all back together again exactly. It’s one of the things I’m most proud of. And now we think the King Eddy will become one of the most important music venues in Canada. Touring bands will come through—even big names—and want to play here, just for the sheer honour of playing in these old walls.”

The recording console is a massive board of faders, dials and blinking lights. It’s the unit that Queen recorded “Bohemian Rhapsody” on.

We descended into the old brick building, bare as yet of tables or a real bar. They’re selling some of the bricks now. Funders can get their name engraved on one and have it put back into the wall, so they can be a part of history too.

I followed Mosker again and we entered a garage-sized room at the back of the Eddy. “This will be the new broadcast studio for CKUA radio. They’re thrilled. They can’t wait to move in.”

A radio station, performance halls, exhibition rooms, rare instruments. “What’s your favorite acquisition?” I asked him. “What’s the one thing you got to hold in your hands that really impressed you?”

“Well,” he began, “I studied jazz piano. That’s what I wanted to do at first, so for me it’s Elton John’s piano.”

I had seen this upright piano at the Cantos building. It seemed like nothing special then, except that it was painted white and was in Elton John’s apartment all through the writing of his first five albums. It’s what he used to write “Rocket Man.” “For me,” Mosker said, “it was when I got to play ‘Tiny Dancer,’ playing the same chords that Elton John played for the first time on that piano.”

“And it will be here in NMC, that piano?”

“Absolutely. We have a harpsichord from 1591. We have the TONTO synthesizer that Stevie Wonder used. And here’s the thing: It’s not hands off. These things are not only for researchers in white gloves. A person can come here and record on them. That’s the whole idea. It’s living history. They’re meant to be played, to be heard.”

We headed up another set of stairs. “This side of Studio Bell will have three recording studios. All the electronics are state of the art, but the consoles are—well, come and see.”

He edged into a room on the second floor, somewhere now above the King Eddy. The recording console was a massive board of faders and dials and blinking lights not unlike others I had seen. “This one,” he said, “is the Trident A-Range. This is the same console that Queen recorded ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ on. Down the hall, we have another that was used by the Sex Pistols. But the third one is the big one.”

“The Rolling Stones,” I said. “You have the Rolling Stones mobile unit.”

“Exactly. We knew it was coming up for sale and we jumped on it.”

The Rolling Stones mobile unit is actually a whole truck, like a food truck except that it has a recording console and chairs and speakers. The Rolling Stones recorded Exile on Main Street on it, and Sticky Fingers and loads of other things. Led Zeppelin recorded parts of the Stairway to Heaven album on it. Bob Marley recorded his live version of “No Woman, No Cry.” The mobile unit is even immortalized in Deep Purple’s iconic “Smoke on the Water.” The truck was in Geneva in 1971 when the band’s studio space burned down and Deep Purple had to turn to the unit to finish the album. “Make records with a mobile,” is one of the lyrics.

“The point is,” said Mosker, “young bands from Calgary, from Alberta, from Canada, they can come and record on it.” His voice stepped down to a whisper. “And under the console, we found this hidden drawer. You know, maybe a place for Keith Richards’s stash.”

He swung open one last door and we came out on the rooftop of the King Eddy. Above us the bridge swung out over 4th Street, clad in silver-blue terra cotta tiles.

“The building will reflect the environment,” said Mosker. “The tiles change colour with the time of the day, even the time of the year. There are five different parts, vessels we call them. They’re like hoodoos and glaciers and mountains. We worked very closely with Brad Cloepfil, the architect, right from the beginning.”

I remembered an earlier comment Mosker had made when I’d asked him on the phone about the origins of the project. “This could only happen in Alberta,” he’d told me. When I’d asked him why, he’d paused. “Because we put up our hand and said we could do it. We want this to be a place of pride for Calgarians and Albertans.”

By the end of the tour, I was in agreement. The NMC building is spectacular. The project is a bold venture, unprecedented in the province. It is about the music, yes, but it is more. As Mayor Nenshi said, it will draw attention from across the country, from around the world, and stand as a Calgary landmark for decades to come.

Calgary’s Glenn Dixon is the author of Tripping the World Fantastic: A Journey through the Music of Our Planet.

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The post The New National Music Centre appeared first on Alberta Views.

They are part of what you might call the “creative class,” though Startup Edmonton co-founder Ken Bautista much prefers “creative entrepreneurs.” And he is counting on them—and himself, as a game designer turned venture capitalist—to help diversify the province’s boom–bust economy.

He’s not alone in this thinking. “These conversations come up every time we have a downturn,” says Todd Hirsch, ATB’s senior economist and author of The Boiling Frog Dilemma: Saving Canada from Economic Decline. “These creative professionals are really important, and Alberta [must] emphasize that right now because we don’t have a very diversified economy.”

Creative professionals. Creative entrepreneurs. Creative class. Whatever you call them, in 2007 they contributed at least $84.6-billion to the Canadian economy, or 7.4 per cent of its gross domestic product, according to the Conference Board of Canada (provincial breakdowns are unavailable). And that’s based on a definition of creative economy that encompasses only goods and services in the arts and culture sectors. In his seminal 2002 book The Rise of the Creative Class, Richard Florida, who coined the term, uses a broader definition: “The core of the creative class [is] people in science and engineering, architecture and design, education, arts, music and entertainment, whose economic function is to create new ideas, new technology and/or new creative content.”

This goes beyond intellectual property. Florida sees a wider group of knowledge-based workers, including educators, business consultants and PR professionals, who “draw on complex bodies of knowledge to solve specific problems.” By this definition, the creative class makes up 36 per cent of Calgary’s workforce and 30 per cent of Edmonton’s, according to the Martin Prosperity Institute, a Toronto think tank directed by Florida. What excites proponents of the creative class is that it can grow endlessly. Oil and gas are temporary economies, but ideas turned into goods and services are limitless.

Though Florida’s terminology and many of his theories—namely that creative types will spur economic prosperity wherever they settle—aren’t as widely accepted as they once were, business leaders across Alberta are still trying to attract, foster and retain creative people.

Energy made up 22 per cent of this province’s $306.7-billion GDP in 2012. This is an improvement from three decades ago, when energy made up more than a third of the economy. Still, the industry is very much like the dinosaurs from which we once thought oil originated—king of the economic ecosystem, yet most vulnerable to unpredictable disasters.

Last year Albertans saw yet again what happens to funding for healthcare, infrastructure development and especially advanced education when the Alberta government latches its various budgets to an oil derrick. “Look at what we go through,” says Luke Azevedo of Calgary Economic Development. “It’s an ebb and flow economy—years where everything is on a high, costs and jobs go up, and then there’s a downturn. It’s so cyclical.”

Azevedo, Calgary’s commissioner of film, TV and creative industries (the latter part of his title is a recent amendment), doesn’t think his sector is the key to further diversification, “but it will be one of them.” More importantly a vibrant culture gives residents—especially the new ones who may have come for energy jobs—more reason to stay.

“Creative professionals are really important, and Alberta must emphasize that, because we don’t have a very diversified economy.” —Todd Hirsch, ATB senior economist

Startup Edmonton’s home, the rickety, insufficiently heated Mercer Warehouse, symbolizes the creative economy’s ability to fill economic voids. A century ago, the building was a busy shipping-and-receiving operation for agricultural and manufactured goods, but as those sectors dwindled so too did the warehouse’s usefulness. It sat empty for decades, except maybe when the occasional fashion photographer needed a dingy background. But two years ago the building owner and Startup Edmonton, Guru Digital Arts College and the owners of a bar and a café joined forces to instantly make this one of the most popular street corners in all of Edmonton.

Startup Edmonton is also a regular meeting place for people in theatre, computer programming and film. Membership fees cover a third of the $700,000 operating budget. The rest comes from benefactors and the City of Edmonton.

Bautista and co-founder Cam Linke have become two of the most influential Edmontonians outside of public office. When city council debated how the remainder in the 2014 budget should be used, mayor Don Iveson thrust his support behind Startup Edmonton instead of a community league or tourism initiative. “You need a level of interaction and cross-pollination occurring somewhere in your creative economy, and we need hubs for that,” says Iveson. He’d like to see more places like Startup Edmonton sprout throughout the capital and spread the creative culture. Already, a strong local movement called “Make Something Edmonton” celebrates DIY culture. Former mayor Stephen Mandel’s task force on image and reputation recommended that city employees’ business cards pay homage with the phrase “What are you making How can we help?”

In Calgary, AcceleratorYYC fulfills a similar role as Startup Edmonton (billing itself a “startup community hub and co-work space”) but hasn’t taken off in the same way. However, there’s much excitement around two developments, cSPACE, (the “c” is for creative) in the former King Edward School, and the Alberta Creative Hub, spearheaded by Calgary Economic Development (CED). Azevedo hopes the latter will help bring the city renown for its creative sector. And the need for the $22.8-million film studio, sound stage and hub for digital and media arts, Azevedo says, has never been more urgent. “When we have a [film] sector that functions on Alberta’s vistas and its people, and the vistas are only accessible six months of the year, how do you grow the people of that sector when you have nowhere to put them?”

He was disappointed when Alberta Culture denied the $13-million support he requested to complete the hub, which had been in limbo for eight years. The return on investment for film is $5 for every dollar invested, according to CED, but Minister Heather Klimchuk still won’t offer more than $5-million. “There’s never enough money [for arts infrastructure],” Azevedo says with some frustration. “There’s always somewhere else to put it.”

“If the government goes into a project funding half of it, that’s not healthy,” says Klimchuk. This is a double standard when you consider the billions of dollars that have gone toward stimuli in the energy sector, such as the Alberta Oil Sands Technology & Research Authority, a public–private venture formed by the Lougheed government in 1974 (now called Alberta Innovates—Energy and Environment Solutions). Four private partners will work with CED on developing the film studio. Klimchuk acknowledges the hub’s importance to growing the creative sector. “It’s about economic diversification,” she says.

But is Alberta Culture doing enough to cultivate the creative economy Sean Gouglas, director of the University of Alberta’s office of interdisciplinary studies, thinks the province could do more, for example, by taking the video gaming industry seriously. At $66-billion worldwide market revenue for 2013, video games are neck and neck with the film industry, which in Alberta is eligible for government grants. Gouglas, who co-directs the university’s new video game development program, the second of its kind in Western Canada, says, “Alberta really needs to consider whether it wants to be a significant player in the game industry, especially when you have to compete with provinces giving significant tax incentives, like Quebec and Ontario.” Local video game companies, such as the Edmonton industry giant BioWare, pay a low corporate tax rate, but this is not comparable to the incentives offered by other provinces.

Bautista, however, doesn’t think tax incentives will help the talent pool he’s trying to grow. “Tax credits would be great for a big company like BioWare,” he says. “But for a brand new company, tax credits are not going to help fund them and get them going.” Instead, space and mentorship are most valuable to creatives of all kinds, he says.

Todd Hirsch agrees. In August he was asked by Klimchuk to chair the refreshed Premier’s Council on Culture with 21 others from the province’s arts, education and technology sectors. The fact that one of Alberta’s leading economists is heading such a council shows a changing view on what creativity is and what it’s for. The team includes several committees with various focuses, including one called Creativity and Transforming the Economy. What the agenda won’t include, says Hirsch, is a request for more money.

“Rather than just cutting cheques to arts groups, maybe the province can provide some business and entrepreneurial prowess to these groups,” he says. An accountant-in-residence program, for example, could give them the business savvy they might lack. Another idea is convincing landlords of empty commercial spaces to offer them to creative people as free and temporary studios or jam spaces, something that Edmonton’s mayor is already giving serious consideration. Iveson is also exploring zoning changes that would incentivize builders to create more rental apartments in Edmonton’s homeowner-dominated market in order to bring up the vacancy rate (which is Canada’s second lowest after Calgary) and bring down the costs of rent, which would make the city more affordable for entrepreneurs, artists and other creative types.

Hirsch says, “[Minister Klimchuk] wants some eyebrow-raising recommendations, and if the first recommendation we give her is ‘do not increase direct funding to arts groups,’ that’s going to raise some eyebrows, but then [she’ll] keeping reading.” He laughs. “I might get thrown off the council!”

In the mid-2000s, when Ontario manufacturing plants started closing or laying off workers by the hundreds, the provincial government got to work on a report called Seizing Global Opportunities: Ontario’s Innovation Agenda. This is what’s needed for Alberta, says Dr. Daniel Doz, president of Alberta College of Art + Design. This is what he hopes will come out of the Premier’s Council, of which he too is a member.

Doz knows well how a behemoth sector—manufacturing in Ontario, oil here in Alberta—affects all others. ACAD was promised a 2 per cent increase in the 2013/14 budget but instead saw a 7.3 per cent cut. Meanwhile, he says, the registrar’s office had three-quarters more applicants than the year before. Luckily ACAD didn’t have to admit fewer students, but it did combine some courses and has risked diluting students’ learning. As ACAD is one of four art colleges in Canada, Doz fears continued cuts will send students away from Alberta. “Our students and faculty, as consumers and producers of art, enrich the fabric of the city,” he says. “Their presence really is important.”

Similar funding cuts to Advanced Education & Enterprise led Mount Royal University to suspend its theatre and music diplomas as well as its journalism certificate, and the U of A to put several design, music and theatre programs on the chopping block. Of course, every Alberta post-secondary institution is still reeling from the budget, but the arts were hit hard because they typically have lower enrolments. This, however, is misunderstood as waning interest, says Doz. “The way we teach art and design is often in smaller classes, because that’s the best way to teach them.”

Universities and colleges are important to the creative class not just because of their arts programs or the training they provide, but because they’re often young people’s first encounter with the kind of intellectual friction that feeds creativity. “These are places of collision, where ideas happen,” says Doz. To that end, ACAD is also planning a Creativity and Entrepreneurship Centre of Excellence that would put artists and entrepreneurs in the same venue for speaking series, “hackathons” (marathon events to invent new software in single sittings) and other events, while also helping secure student internships and venture capital for startups.

Michael Macdonald is a music professor at MacEwan University and senior research associate with Creative Alberta, a group encouraging creativity in culture, commerce and especially education. He would also like to see more business overlap within arts education. “We need to train artists also to be entrepreneurs, and until we’re doing that, regardless of what the rhetoric is, we’re not building a cultural sector.”

Haley Simons, CEO of Creative Alberta, goes further, saying that the change needs to begin at the K–12 level. She is an internationally performing pianist who became disheartened by people who view artists as “trained monkeys.” She says current curriculum focuses too much on “known-outcome value systems”—basically, teaching things that have definite answers instead of encouraging discovery and invention. “If we’re only teaching what we know, how do we discover what we don’t know?” she asks. Imaginative learning, she suggests, is the key to building a creative economy that services every industry, not just the inherently artistic ones.

It’s easy to get riled up about creative cities, classes, sectors and what have you. Attach “creative” to anything—an industry, a brand, a half-eaten sandwich—and you make it instantly more appealing. We speak about creativity as if it were a recently discovered natural resource, but really it’s just freedom to indulge one’s imagination. I’m left wondering: Are we just breathing in the fumes of a modern yet temporary social trend?

Last February, Richard Florida surprised all but his critics by admitting that his creative-class theories—which hold that creatives would pull ailing economies from the dust—may have been overly optimistic. This must have come as a shock for bureaucrats in struggling cities such as Detroit and Cleveland, which paid the economist and University of Toronto professor large sums for policy consulting.

Some experts take offence to the term “creative class,” calling it elitist and saying it ghettoizes the working class and other demographics that are creative in their own ways. “I work for a bank but I like to think I’m a creative person,” says Hirsch, a cautious promoter of Florida’s work. He also points out that other attempts to diversify the Alberta economy, such as encouraging a magnesium industry in the 1980s, have failed, and that there’s no reason to think creative industries are immune.

“If Alberta is to compete for the best talent, the province must foster an environment that encourages the arts to thrive.” —Alberta Chambers of Commerce

Other critics have said the idea of a creative class is hyped up, or accused it of masking the decline of the arts sector. Indeed, Calgary Economic Development’s 2010 creative industries profile, written to espouse the strength of the sector, showed that most of the industry’s growth between 2004 and 2009 was only happening in non-traditional creative practices, such as design, and in sectors surrounding the creative core, such as PR and consultation. But the more traditional elements of the creative economy, from recording artists to art dealers, were shrinking almost across the board.

“You can’t draw a direct link to the economic health of an urban centre just because you’re going to put a bunch of artists in the centre and support them,” says Jeffrey Anderson, executive director of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts (AFA). He challenges that part of the Richard Florida school of thought. However, that doesn’t mean arts support doesn’t have important social value, he says. “We know that having art in communities leads to greater social cohesion, that it brings people together in a positive way. Art, in all its forms, has a lot of tentacles. Not just economic.”

Edmonton mayor Don Iveson does believe that the creative industries—especially the fine arts—can pay economic dividends in unforeseen ways. “You can be a better pipeline engineer if you’re stimulated by creative experiences in your community,” he says. But cities also need denser cores for that intellectual friction—what he calls the “bumping in the hallway effect.” Like Naheed Nenshi, Iveson has made infill development and density a major issue. Only then can creativity and innovation become more than buzzwords.

The AFA is the cornerstone of Alberta’s creative industries. Its grants support hundreds of arts organizations and festivals every year as well as over 1,000 individuals. According to the 2012 AFA report Arts Impact Alberta, the local arts sector is worth $378-million. The AFA was not affected by the latest cuts, but was sliced so severely in the Stelmach era that it has yet to catch up to its former $35-million budget. Still, Anderson says, artists are moving to (or back to) Alberta in droves. For a population of four million to sustain at least 10 renowned arts companies, such as Alberta Ballet, is a significant achievement. And this province’s cost of living is more attractive than Vancouver’s or Toronto’s.

According to the Canada Council for the Arts, the return on every $1 invested by government in an Alberta artist or organization is $15.75, compared to $12.92 in Quebec and $10.87 in BC. Yet the Council still only saw 765 Alberta applications last year, compared to 2,400 from BC. And that’s after a five-year plan to induce more grant applicants from Alberta. Perhaps the demand for the core of the creative industry—where the traditional arts such as dance, music and literature entertain us, provoke us, reflect our cultural identity back to us—is larger than its supply. Indeed, the population has grown by a quarter in just over a decade, but arts funding hasn’t kept pace, something Minister Klimchuk will admit: “We’re always playing catch-up.”

And yet, there is still a labour shortage in most economies, creative or otherwise. Employers here offer some of the best salaries and benefit packages, yet have positions to fill. A thriving arts sector is one of the best enticements left. As the Alberta Chambers of Commerce put it in a 2011 report, “If Alberta is to compete for the best talent, the province must ensure that it fosters an environment that encourages the arts to thrive.”

Indeed, while the creative industries on their own won’t save Alberta from another bust or “bitumen bubble,” they can help, even if by just giving residents a reason to stay. According to Statistics Canada, only one in four people who migrated to Alberta for work between 2004 and 2009 listed the province as their primary residence (which means the rest paid income taxes elsewhere). To them, Wild Rose Country is a stopover.

“Alberta continues to be the ATM of the country,” says Hirsch. “People come here, they get their cash and they get out. In the long run that’s not a fantastic way to build a community. What’s here to anchor them and to keep them?” It may be a music scene that never rests, a theatre company premiering plays that go on to international success, a culturally vibrant neighbourhood or a refurbished warehouse like Startup Edmonton where people can think up and launch the next great idea. It will be something that strengthens Alberta’s, and therefore their own, identity. “This is not a Calgary versus Edmonton thing,” says Ken Bautista. “This is Alberta versus the world.”

Omar Mouallem is an Edmonton-based writer whose most recent story for Alberta Views was “Policing the Police” (June 2013).

The post Creative Space appeared first on Alberta Views.

I did not know then that the Albertan architect Douglas Cardinal would become a household name, synonymous with a distinctive combination of curves, light and stone—building components, yes, but also echoes, hints of the mysteries of nature that most man-made structures ignore or deliberately shut out.

When I meet Douglas Cardinal in 2013, at his signature building, the Canadian Museum of Civilization (now renamed the Canadian Museum of History), I am surprised that he is, unlike his structures, almost angular, an imposing man in stature and demeanour. His face seems carved with sternness, until he smiles. But that smile is fleeting, as if he were unwilling to show either vulnerability or pleasure. This man reads everything around him with studied intention.

We introduce ourselves at the entrance of the museum, on the banks of the Ottawa River in Gatineau. This iconic landmark, more than any other structure besides the Parliament Buildings and the Peace Tower itself, stands for what we know we are as Canadians. The site itself is beautiful, but the building is breathtaking, a series of stacked and sinuous curves that suggest and replicate the rivers it pays homage to. It seems Cardinal could probably rest on his laurels forever as the creator of that vision.

We walk toward the magnificent open cliff of the Great Hall, and are stopped by a guard who asks for our tickets. Cardinal does not flinch but reacts matter-of-factly. “I’m giving her a tour; I’m the architect.”

The young attendant looks puzzled, then mutters okay, and it is all I can do not to shout at him. “Do you know who this is This man created this place!” But I say nothing, and we proceed, with Cardinal shrugging when I express incredulity that he is not recognized. His history with Canada’s flagship museum has not always been smooth, even after the place was built and opened. He tells me that for years he was not invited back or asked for input on the building’s condition, and that he and Victor Rabinovitch (director from 2000–2011) rarely spoke. When I ask why, Cardinal shrugs and says, “Politics. The new director, Mark O’Neill, first thing he did was call me up and say, we have to get together. Here we are, this museum is the most popular Canadian icon, and we don’t have a relationship Let’s talk.”

Such elemental forbearance seems to be intrinsic to Douglas Joseph Cardinal, OC, recipient of more than a dozen honorary doctorates and countless other distinctions, including the Gold Medal of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada and a Governor General’s Award for Visual and Media Arts. He is a household name, if not necessarily recognizable as an architectural rock star.

Cardinal is a native Albertan. Born in Calgary to parents of German-Metis (mother) and Aboriginal (father) ancestry, he attended St. Joseph’s Convent residential school near Red Deer, where he soaked up music, literature and drawing, getting excellent marks and serving as head altar boy. “My mother and father, because they had to deal with so much racism, decided to keep me from that,” he says. “I went to a convent school.” The contradiction of that statement does not seem to unsettle him. “Oh, there was racism, but I figured out that the way to survive was to excel, to do exactly what was expected, and more.”

He went on to study at UBC’s School of Architecture, where his insistence on using curved lines did not meet with approval (this was the conventional 1950s), and he pulled out in the third year of his program. “The director of the program said I had the wrong family background, that I’d never be an architect.” He left for the University of Texas at Austin, where he says each individual was supported to develop himself.

Back in Alberta, Cardinal began to work as an architect, first making a living by designing rumpus rooms and ordinary houses, until in 1968 he was commissioned to build St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church in Red Deer.

If Cardinal has any pedagogical father, it is surely Rudolf Steiner, best known for founding Waldorf education, but whose architectural work as well refused traditional constraints, especially the right angle as key to building. Steiner’s “anthroposophy” (a mixture of idealism and theosophy) underpins Cardinal’s adamant insistence on connecting the spiritual to the structural, the visionary to the physical.

But his relationship to Father Werner Merx, the Oblate priest who worked with Cardinal on St. Mary’s church, was also foundational. Cardinal says he imagined embodying in brick the vision of Father Merx, who wanted a clean, uncluttered space, evocative and open. “Every day Father Merx would look at what I had done and criticize my drawings, so when I put all the shapes of the building together I did it exactly the way he wanted it to function. The form grew out of the function.”

Canadian Museum of Civilization

However that sounds, Cardinal’s translation of idea into physical structure is not utilitarian. To Cardinal, “function” is what happens in a building, while form is the spatial transfiguration of that activity’s aesthetic yearning. He considers how people will feel in a structure, and how outside forces, sun and wind, will act on it. St. Mary’s is a naked church, where belief and worship curl together in a cauldron of brick both sublime and subdued, what Cardinal calls a “natural organism.” The altar hovers under an almost planetary shaft of light, and the play of illumination and darkness throughout the building echoes Stonehenge as well as Chartres.

Cardinal’s buildings are generated from the inside out rather than the outside in, and their actualization is often challenging. They are seldom rectilinear, never square. He has been accorded the designation of curvilinear architect, one whose structures don’t follow a grid or replicate square boxes. Over and over Cardinal mentions to me how important it is for an architect to work with his clients. His buildings, he says, “have a soul.”

“Most places don’t serve the people in them,” he says sadly; they fail both aesthetically and functionally, directing people, confining them, limiting their view. His desire is to make buildings that connect people to their environment rather than separate them from it.

His complicated aspirations seem part of the crux of why Cardinal is considered “difficult.” Notwithstanding his success (he can take credit for more than 100 built projects), Cardinal’s path has never been easy. He has a reputation for going over budget, for taking longer than anticipated on timelines and for insisting on the impossible. As if curved walls weren’t enough, he also includes sightlines, solstice lines and sculptural undulations. Despite his groundbreaking work with technology—Cardinal was one of the first architects to use computers to calculate structural accuracy—those loops and meanders are not always easy or cheap to produce.

And perhaps, too, Cardinal’s rather prickly place within the ranks of “famous architects” has to do with his work’s political inflection; activism and architecture are an odd combination, but Cardinal has always juggled them. Early in the architect’s career, Fred Colborne, Alberta’s Minister of Public Works between 1962 and 1967, gave Cardinal a lot of work and divulged that he wanted Cardinal to help First Nations people take on what were in the 1960s the severely racist policies of the federal government.

As someone who had been involved in the human rights movement when he lived in the US, Cardinal is an experienced reader of political discourse. He jokes about how Texans didn’t quite know how to respond to his accent: “The weirdest thing was that I had a Canadian accent, which sounds to them like a Harvard accent. When I was there, it was totally segregated. Black students, Arab students, and I was a foreign student. But what was so different for me, in Texas at the time, they were trying to be very white. They would try to teach their kids to get rid of the southern accent because they thought of it as a black accent. Kids would be taking elocution to speak in a more cultured accent. And I sounded cultured, so I experienced reverse discrimination.”

Cardinal talks with enormous respect about Pierre Trudeau, whom he first met while advocating for First Nations issues. In that way, he came to Trudeau’s attention and when the time came to select an architect for a national museum, Trudeau knew Cardinal possessed powerful prescience. “He told me that he wanted to establish symbols of nationhood: a constitution to enshrine our rights; a gallery to enshrine the arts; a museum to enshrine our cultures. He wanted these symbols to be in place.”

But not all of their encounters were uncomplicated. “When I got the commission, I had to fly to Ottawa,” Cardinal remembers. “For 10 years I had negotiated with Trudeau and Canada for rights for the First Nations. But I thought, well, I have this big commission, so I cut my hair, put on a three-piece suit. Trudeau walks in, looks around the room, says to his minister, ‘Where’s that Indian architect I gave him the most important commission in the country and he doesn’t even come to shake my hand?’ The minister says, ‘Prime Minister, he’s right over there.’”

Cardinal says Trudeau told him, “‘I didn’t recognize you without all your regalia.’ I said, ‘Prime Minister, I haven’t changed a bit. I am exactly the same inside.’ And Trudeau said, ‘If you make the same commitment to my vision as you did to your people, we’ll have a good museum.’ ”

Cardinal pauses, “He was my best client.” When the architect brought his models and drawings to Ottawa, Trudeau wanted to know and understand every aspect of the design. Cardinal remembers him saying, “This is good. I can fully understand what you have done here. What I wanted was a building that related to nature, to our dramatic environment. This reminds me of taking a canoe trip, seeing the large swells. I would rather have a symbol in the capital that reflects the Canadian landscape than a symbol of any one culture. Anyone who has an affinity to the land can relate to this building.”

Cardinal is less sanguine about the long, hard grind that it took to concretize the vision, about his quarrels with “political reality” and especially with Brian Mulroney, the prime minister who opened the Museum of Civilization. “I was not popular with the government because, for example, although Trudeau established a separate Crown corporation, which was independent and answerable to him, the Conservative government put the corporation under Public Works. So then I was met with all the political problems.” He claims that the support of Joe Clark and the Alberta caucus, especially Don Mazankowski, actually helped bring the project to fruition.

“It was a lot of work. When it opened, people loved it, there was a major celebration, but I was rather exhausted at the time. I had such a time; the government of the day tried to take the stone off and put on aluminum siding, wanted to put lino on all the floors, they were trying to cut the cost. I had to deal with an awful lot. The current director says, ‘Your generation gave you a rough time; it is my generation that appreciates it.’ ”

The result is spectacular, and that Canadians have lived with it for almost 25 years now (the museum opened in 1989) does not diminish its breathtaking effect. The light, the curves and the organic feel of the structure suggest a prairie spaciousness that is to my eyes profoundly Western.

Cardinal explains that he was trying to capture “the expansiveness of the country. You can’t define it. The challenge was how to design the building to respect the site. In most Canadian cities, nobody really addresses the power of the river, or people’s relationship with the river. We don’t even have that in Edmonton or Calgary, with the Bow River and the North Saskatchewan. There are parks, but nothing that says, Here’s the river. European cities embrace their rivers. I wanted people to be able to see the Parliament buildings across the river, to see the historical buildings on the other side of the river. That was important.”

This reading of site and situation that Cardinal brings to his buildings has been the cause of no small commotion, most especially with the controversy over the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. In a conflicted series of twists and turns, Cardinal won the commission for that museum—the last one to be built on the Mall in Washington—and then entered into what could only be described as a long war that was even more draining than his struggle to encapsulate Trudeau’s national aspiration. While his conceptual design met with enthusiasm and he was chosen over all the architects in the US, the bureaucracy of Washington was even more byzantine than Ottawa’s.

A series of skirmishes over Cardinal’s design combined with delays to his financial disbursements led to increasingly acrimonious struggles that ultimately led to his being let go from the project. He says the root cause was a resistance to the unusual plan he was trying to implement, derived from “vision sessions” with 16 tribal elders who came to Washington and recounted their family and originary stories. The Smithsonian claims that Cardinal did not work well with the Philadelphia-based firm of Geddes Brecher Qualls Cunningham, the project managers, and that there were squabbles about expenses and money. The Smithsonian was reluctant to intercede in the dispute, Cardinal held his drawings hostage, and the Smithsonian fired both Cardinal and GBQC, followed by a series of suits and countersuits on multiple sides. Quelle désastre. The Smithsonian hired a different team, and Cardinal was sidelined.

But it seems his inspiration had already settled onto the last-remaining museum space on Washington DC’s mall. The replacement architectural team’s attempts to modify Cardinal’s design ultimately met with disapproval and a directive to work as much as possible with the original concept. While Cardinal was never officially reinstated as the architect, anyone who has seen his work recognizes his signature immediately: the National Museum of the American Indian, while it may not necessarily be a Cardinal building, nevertheless looks like a Cardinal building, its curves and rock-face structure as indelibly recognizable as the paleolithic art of Lascaux. That may have been the tipping point for his US experience. “I wanted to design a powerful, female building that is nurturing and protecting. Long cantilever over the main entrance. Shaded.” Cardinal did not attend the 2004 opening, but he has been inside since, and he is vocal about the design’s compromises. And while he says he is not bitter, he is clearly very pained about what happened to his vision and the vision of the elders that he so much wanted to actualize.

Cardinal’s base now is his home, an ordinary house that he rents on the banks of the Rideau River. His team of young architects and designers are settled in his cosy walk-out basement. There’s not much space, but they work together in a hum of energy that combines suppressed excitement with contentment. They don’t make a big deal out of being part of the atelier of a master, but they know, it is clear, that they are apprentices to ideas bigger than the screens of their computers, and much bigger than the fragments of stone or brick that together comprise buildings. Because Cardinal was one of the first architects to use computers as integral tools in the design process, no one on his team is afraid of technology, and the programs they work with are so sophisticated that they can calculate infinitesimal measurements.

The architect’s recent work reflects a quiet industry that he hopes will eventually take him back to Alberta. The Aanischaaukamikw Cree Cultural Institute in Ouje-Bougoumou, Quebec, which opened in 2012, is an open-armed, ship-like structure serving as a museum and gathering place. Ground has been broken for the Gordon Oakes-Red Bear Student Centre at the University of Saskatchewan; design for the Long Point First Nation School in Winneway, Quebec, is in process; and the Regina Entertainment Stadium is coming to visualization. “I really want to do more work in Alberta,” Cardinal says. “I am a little tired of learning all about political complexities. I feel that people out West are more real.”

Whether that is the case or not, Cardinal’s shapely buildings express contours more undulating than angular. There is a feminine sensibility to the spaces he invites the visitor to enter, and he talks about his buildings as defying the expectations of male order based on conflict. He explains, “Most buildings are readily definable from the outside; this building [the Museum of Civilization] is not like that. Guys want you to define space. They want to know where they are at so they can defend it. This space confuses them. What’s around the corner They don’t know.”

Cardinal has himself engaged in tough fights, court pugilism and plenty of scraps. Beneath his gentle exterior lurks a version of warrior, a powerful strength that has carried him through almost 80 years, four marriages, many moves, multiple divorces, children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and, not least, buildings. He concedes he has had to fight with his own confrontational ambition, and he says he is no longer interested in fighting. He attributes much of his newfound peacefulness to his Basque wife, Idoia Arana-Beobide, saying, “I am glad I am married to a Basque, but they are the most stubborn people I have met in my whole life.”

This could be a case of the stubborn calling out the stubborn. Still, Cardinal’s refusal to adhere to linearity or predictability is not simplistic, and he says it reflects his family heritage. “I got that from my mother. My mother is part German; her father was a homesteader at Madden. She grew up on the farm there. She was always exposed to culture, music, and she was a nurse, actually a supervisor at the hospital at Ponoka. She was already established when she met my father at 26. As a professional with a strong European background, she had to endure an awful lot of crap. She grew up in a very racist society, a society where women were not respected, they were non-persons. My father, being a First Nations, was accustomed to a matriarchal society where women are the centre of the family. They were always respected, always had more power. She met my father and moved to a log cabin in the Porcupine Hills. They were totally different people: she was very German and he was very First Nations, he was a hunter and a trapper. I loved and admired them both but I learned two whole different world views from them. One view of harmony and nature and respect and love and caring from my father, and the other one from my mother about serving people.”

“So when I look at my architecture, it is more Ionic [delicate and scroll-like] than Doric [heavy and simple]. I think that buildings should be nurturing places that show a concern and respect for people. That is generally my approach to architecture. I suppose I was brought up to believe that the soft power of love is much more powerful than the hard power of force.”

“So I think that when you love your work and love people, life can be very rewarding. If you take the other approach, and try and play these power and control games, then you live a life of stress and aggravation. I wanted this building [the Museum of Civilization] to be one of nurturing and caring. If you have that, no matter how you put it together, then people get it, and they enjoy the space.”

Douglas Cardinal has changed since his Edmonton days, and he says he has “learned a lot.” When I ask him now, in 2013, about the house on the suburban crescent overlooking the North Saskatchewan in Edmonton, he remembers mostly how the Grotskis loved the way he used cedar to intensify the natural setting of the property.

But I remember standing on the sidewalk and trying to read the secrets of that house. There was something there that I could not put my finger on at the time. It was implacable, mysterious, alluring. At that time, I thought it was design. Now I would call it poetry. Douglas Cardinal’s poetry.

Aritha van Herk is a prolific author, teacher and critic, and a member of the Royal Society of Canada. She lives in Calgary.

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But the woman with me isn’t enjoying the view today. “They’re taking parkland and turning it into a parking lot,” says Anne Lambert. A resident of the community of Oliver, Lambert is referring to plans to build a 29-storey condominium tower here on the edge of the river valley. The plan also calls for a large parkade beneath the building. Where this projected landmark of “international architectural significance” will be built, a comparatively humble edifice now stands: the Norris cabin.

As of early 2011, the Norris cabin is undeniably Edmonton’s most contentious log cabin. Built in 1935 by Frank G. Newton, it’s one of the few remaining such buildings within city limits. As cabins go, it was a pretty fancy specimen back in its day: two storeys, a gigantic fieldstone fireplace, double-hung sash windows. Its first occupant was Fred Norris, a manager for Imperial Oil.

The cabin is most famous, however, because of Mel Hurtig. One of Edmonton’s best-known exports, Hurtig opened a number of successful bookstores (one of which survives in downtown Edmonton’s Audreys), published Canada’s first encyclopedia, started a national political party, founded the Council of Canadians, became an Officer of the Order of Canada and, for a period from 1987 until he decamped for Vancouver in 2005, lived in the Norris cabin.

The cabin’s present owner, Peter Allard, wants to redevelop the property. Allard has hired Stantec, a consulting firm that is one of Edmonton’s homegrown multinationals, to oversee the development of a condominium tower on the lot that currently houses the cabin.

Lambert, a short woman with a shock of superdyed red hair, has, along with her husband, spearheaded a project to save the Norris cabin. Under their direction, the Community of Oliver Group, or COG, has been raising a ruckus about the proposed project. They’ve voiced opposition at community meetings, signed petitions and written to city councillors. Over 100 people packed a church hall on 123rd St in September to voice opposition to the project.

The Historic Resources department is “very pro-development. We’d just like to ensure it’s done sympathetically.”

“It’s not just a ‘not in my backyard’ issue,” explains Lambert, a retired professor of human ecology at the University of Alberta. “I mean, it is in my backyard… but so many people use this area.” Lambert’s house, a 1912 structure originally built for a troupe of touring musical entertainers called the Palmatier Sisters, sits about a dozen metres from the cabin’s lot and shares its idyllic vista.

The Edmonton Journal reported in September that GBL Architects, the BC-based firm responsible for Vancouver’s Coal Harbour condos (controversial because many of the owners actually live in Hong Kong), is behind the designs for the tower proposed for the Norris cabin site. “They took drawings for huge buildings in Coal Harbour and just plunked them down here, without any thought about fitting into the community,” says Lambert. Early plans for a lookout point on the edge of the hill, she adds, had people looking into her living room. She believes the developers will have to damage the valley to build the parkade.

The friendship between David Holdsworth, the principal heritage planner for the City of Edmonton, and Simon O’Byrne, the principal lead of urban designing at Stantec, falls into the category of “unlikely.” To put it bluntly, one is responsible for keeping buildings from being torn down while the other often does his work on the sites of demolitions. Both, however, insist that a strategic preserver of historic architecture and a developer can have more in common than what might first appear, even if they disagree about the fate of the Norris cabin.

“We’re very pro-development,” says Holdsworth of Edmonton’s Historic Resources department. ”We’d just like to ensure that it’s done sympathetically. We’re also keen to ensure heritage properties have a continuous lifespan. They may have to change use, they may have to have additions put on them, like The Bay building downtown.” Both of these options, he says, are far preferable to demolishing a building. For this reason, he opposes the proposed redevelopment of the Norris cabin. Not only would a historically significant building be destroyed, the proposal doesn’t include any way to incorporate the cabin.

As a city planner, Holdsworth is also concerned about what the new tower will contribute to the community. He highlights the warehouses in Edmonton’s downtown core that have been successfully “flipped” from industrial to residential use. “A lot of them were threatened,” he says. “But good design speaks to itself: it’s very easy to embed the old with the new.” According to Holdsworth, these new residences tangibly improved the neighbourhoods in which they were built.

As for O’Byrne, who’s in charge of the 115th St redevelopment process, he sighs when the words “Coal Harbour” come up. This has been a rumour dogging the condominium project. “At a public meeting, I said that this is a building with high-quality architecture that wouldn’t be out of place in Coal Harbour,” he says. “I meant that it’ll be one of the nicest buildings that has ever been built in Edmonton.” Because the lot is on a hillside, taking designs from elsewhere would have been impossible, he says. The building under consideration is designed specifically for that plot of land, he adds, and the plans have been extensively modified in response to community concerns.

Stantec’s head offices are only five blocks from the proposed site. O’Byrne says claims that the company is unfamiliar with the site, or with the neighbourhood generally, are inaccurate. Similarly, he points out that another of COG’s concerns—that the lookout and staircase that will be built for the public will look instead into Lambert’s living room—has been addressed. Moreover, in response to community and city responses, the plans go well beyond “not damaging” the river valley, he says: they include a new public access point to the river valley system as well as a public viewing area at the top.

The Central Pentecostal Tabernacle buildings (b. 1964-1972) were torn down despite being rare local examples of the International style. (Kenneth Hynek)

“The developer is spending a lot of money in the public realm… this is very, very unusual,” says O’Byrne.

But then there’s the cabin itself. “There aren’t many log cabins here,” Holdsworth says. “It’s on our inventory, so it’s my job to save it or incorporate in some fashion.” The “inventory” he speaks of is the City of Edmonton’s list of protected buildings and resources—648 by the city’s latest count. Although buildings or resources on the inventory may be demolished or radically altered despite this recognition of their historical significance, those designated as “Municipal Historic Resources” (some 93 on the list) are protected by bylaw. The Edmonton Historical Board (an advisory board to city council) recommends which buildings should go on these lists, taking into account not just their age but their historical, architectural and social significance. While any resource can be longlisted without its owner’s consent, the higher level of protection requires owner cooperation.

Bylaws can only do so much, however. The Gem, a theatre built in 1913 on the Jasper East block of downtown Edmonton, was demolished in 2010 despite being a designated Municipal Historic Resource. After The Gem was protected, the city sold it to realtor Oliver O’Connor in 1999 under the condition that he restore it. The theatre started to rot, and O’Connor refused to sell it back to the City when it became clear the building required immediate attention. By 2010, demolition was the only choice. The city is suing O’Connor for his alleged failure to preserve the historic theatre, and O’Connor is countersuing, claiming the City failed to provide him with reports it possessed about the true condition of the building.

Bylaws similarly failed to protect the Arlington Apartments, built in 1909. The Arlington was Edmonton’s first apartment building. In its day, it was luxury living. By the 1980s, however, residents were complaining that the building was being used for prostitution. Nonetheless, the Arlington was designated a Municipal Historical Resource in 1998. A fire destroyed much of its interior in 2005. Its owner, Saraswati Singh, and others involved in the reconstruction eventually gave up on the restoration conditions the designation demanded. In 2008, they sought and received permission from the city to demolish the 99-year-old apartment building.

“One of the problems is that Edmonton is a young city,” says Holdsworth. “The perception is that we don’t have a lot of heritage. A lot of older buildings were torn down in the 1970s and 1980s. And even now, the sense is that we don’t have anything worth preserving.”

Holdsworth names Edmonton’s old City Hall, built in 1956, as a good example. “It was a fantastic Modern structure,” he says. Cutting edge for its time (its council chamber was on stilts), by the time the 1980s came around old City Hall didn’t look “progressive” anymore. “It’s a classic example of a Modern building that came down for ‘progress,’” he says, referring to the construction of Edmonton’s current City Hall in the early 1990s. “It doesn’t matter if you replace it with something iconic or better.”

The push for “progress” is amplified, as any long-term Alberta resident can attest, during the province’s booms. Demand for housing skyrockets, even if labour is in short supply, and building housing is easy money. Plus, there’s the great exhilaration of possibility that a boom brings. Why hold on to the old when the future is so bright?

Holdsworth and O’Byrne agree that one of the most prominent, and tragic, victims of the tear-it-down, build-something-new mentality during the boom of the early 2000s was the Tabernacle building. The two main buildings of the Central Pentecostal Tabernacle, one square and the other pyramid-shaped, designed by famed architect Peter Hemingway, were built in 1964 and 1972, respectively. The wood-shingled pyramid was iconic but the square structure, built of concrete and gold-green tinted glass in the International style, was totally unique. In the application to save the buildings from demolition, Hemingway’s daughter, Mistaya, praised the structures for their “purity of line” and “simple yet bold statement of function without ornament”—both characteristics of the International style of architecture. The Tabernacle housed annual “Singing Christmas Tree” choir concerts and was so unique that the Heritage Canada Foundation in 2007 listed the site as one of the top ten endangered places in Canada. Nonetheless, the Tabernacle was torn down in 2008 to make way for a condominium development that was never built.

“It was knocked down when the market was strong,” Holdsworth says. “Then the market collapsed and the lot sat empty.

“People build during the booms and cut corners,” he continues. “I lived in Calgary for awhile. A house near us was built as a speculative move—without insulation. There were cowboys then and there are cowboys now. People don’t always know what they’re doing but are in for a quick buck.”

Despite some considerable losses to Edmonton’s architectural heritage, Holdsworth maintains that we know better today. Municipal designations are progressively becoming stronger and applied to more buildings, developers are becoming more attuned to the ways that old buildings can be successively integrated into new projects and the public is slowly becoming more aware of Edmonton’s old architecture as a legacy. But the fact remains that preservation is a major challenge. You can’t force owners to maintain or improve crumbling resources—as the drawn-out debacle with the Gem theatre illustrates.

The Norris cabin, undeniably Edmonton’s most contentious log cabin. (Hugh Lee)

O’Byrne, however, argues that the Norris cabin situation is unlike those concerning the Tabernacle, Arlington Apartments or old City Hall. For starters, he says, the cabin hasn’t been properly maintained. A structural analysis commissioned by Stantec found that the cabin is plagued with black mould and dry rot. O’Byrne argues this is the best argument against trying to preserve it.

“You can’t help but see the deficiencies,” he says. “It’s pretty easy to see with the naked eye that it’s in a state of disrepair.” He says that wood structures need “constant love and attention”— that they need to be treated regularly, if not yearly.

O’Byrne says owner Peter Allard offered the cabin to Fort Edmonton, but they turned it down because of the structure’s condition. The grandson of original builder Frank G. Newton has offered to relocate the cabin to Pigeon Lake, and even though Allard is apparently willing to entertain this option, the cabin’s condition may doom this idea as well. If the cabin does get demolished, O’Byrne says that Stantec plans on trying to remill some of the original wood and will put up a marker indicating its origins.

“Allard wants to be in the vanguard,” adds O’Byrne. “He wants to have a world-class building that wouldn’t be out of place in any other [city]… A lot of people in Edmonton play to the lowest common denominator when it comes to architecture and design. In this case, it’s the opposite. You’ll have the best building possible, using the best material available.” O’Byrne adds that the river valley views permit a more ambitious project than would be possible anywhere else in town.

“I don’t think this [cabin] is a particularly noteworthy historical structure,” he concludes. “It shocks me that we’ve taken down buildings like the Arlington, the Tabernacle, but everyone wants to save this log cabin that’s in miserable shape. For me, personally, there are some really good buildings that we need to be focusing on.”

Holdsworth says he has not been able to obtain a copy of the Stantec report, and points out that not all buildings plagued by mould are beyond rehabilitation. For the condominium to go ahead, Allard and O’Byrne would need city council to pass an amendment to the Oliver Area Redevelopment Plan. This will take time. But Holdsworth agrees that it may be impossible to save the Norris cabin anyway.

“Sometimes you can’t save old buildings,” he says. “When the land value exceeds the heritage value…” Ultimately he doesn’t expect the Norris cabin to be one of the lucky ones.

While talking to me on the edge of the valley in front of the Norris cabin, Anne Lambert offers to go into her house to turn on the kitchen lights so that her stained-glass windows will be easier to see.

Her neighbour, who is outside tinkering with his car, insists that no-one has ever seen the inside of Lambert’s house. “She’s like those people you see on Oprah,” he whispers while Lambert is inside, turning on the lights. “She has stuff everywhere.”

But Lambert lets us both in. Inside the house, it’s true: artifacts and detritus are stacked everywhere. Dusty photos on the walls. Newspaper clippings and ceramic hands that once upon a time modelled leather gloves. Lambert apologizes for the mess; she and her husband have been trying to renovate their basement. They keep having to shuffle things around. She shows off her Arts & Crafts chandelier, the stained-glass windows, the woodwork. All of it is original.

She rattles open the wooden porch doors. Outside it’s an Indian summer; the green valley unfurls lazily and the blue sky is a perfect pitch. The paint is long peeling from the Lamberts’ porch, the lumber is aged and Lambert waves her hand in the direction of the Norris cabin.

“If we lose this battle…” she says, “if we lose the river valley views and the trees for a 29-storey building, then we’ve lost a huge part of the joy of living here.” #

Edmonton’s Jay Smith is a journalist, poet and mother. Her most recent Alberta Views feature was “The Possibility of Hope,” Jan/Feb 2010.

The post Out with the Old appeared first on Alberta Views.

Over the last 10 years, Alberta Views has earned a reputation for questioning how to make this province the best it can be. The magazine has provided commentaries on significant buildings and how they might affect people. As architecture in Alberta has continued to move toward a more mature design ethic, it seems fitting in this 10th anniversary edition of the magazine to identify 10 outstanding buildings constructed over the last decade. These examples certainly indicate a more vibrant future. Making better
places for people is achieved by questioning conventions, not by timidly following.

Lethbridge City Hall

| Lethbridge | This civic building literally and symbolically makes a place for people. It recognizes the public nature of a city hall, the prime gathering place of a democratic community. Curvilinear form differentiates the six-storey building from private-sector commercial facilities. Its massive colonnade projects civic stability. The exterior public space accommodates both arrival and public gathering. The configuration of the main foyer reflects the interconnection of the formal council chambers with the city itself.

Community Design

The first phase of MacKenzie Towne in south Calgary revealed a new direction for the planning and development of residential suburbs: walkable communities, front porches, a small retail “Main Street” and central public facilities. Unfortunately, it met with limited public acceptance, and subsequent phases largely reverted to the conventionally suburban. But Garrison Woods, in the western inner city, struck a chord, revitalizing public enthusiasm for a “community-based” design approach.

Newer suburban residential development is returning to full integration of the uses that make a community more than a mere subdivision. One great example is Mahogany in southeast Calgary.

Arriva Condominiums

| Calgary | The Arriva development reflects the shift toward greater densification of the inner city. Living close to work and shops and restaurants is a good thing. Construction of the first of three 36-storey towers is just finishing. The unique, stepped building form contributes positively to the city skyline. Arriva provides mixed use: retail, restaurants, health and fitness centres, offices and high-quality residences, in a building that has arguably the most contemporary design of all high-rise developments in the city. The construction uses curtain-wall and other systems typically found only in high-end commercial office buildings. This provides a much higher level of finish and building performance. “Building performance” means many things, including mechanical systems performance (hot or cold or draughty); air and moisture penetration, which affect air quality and mould; acoustical performance; sightlines; ability to find one’s way in the building. Arriva’s high standard is a measure of the increasing sophistication in residential accommodation.

Acqua/Vento Condominiums

| Calgary | Two buildings in the Bridges area of Calgary represent an aspect of residential development that will undoubtedly become increasingly important: energy con-servation and resource management. These two buildings, by the same development team, are designed to use 50 per cent less energy than a conventional multi-family building. This includes using 50 per cent less water. The buildings allow grey-water reuse for irrigation, collection of water in cisterns, high-efficiency mechanical systems, enhanced insulation, toxin-free interior finishing materials and very high indoor air quality. Both buildings are anticipated to be certified as LEED-compliant at a gold level—which may soon become mandatory for buildings.

Telus Professional Centre

| University of Alberta, Edmonton | The Telus Centre represents two key areas of design consideration. Given the significant role of Telus in the funding of this building, it is not surprising that the Centre is all about technological innovation and advanced information and communication systems—a clear direction for all future educational facilities. This building is an excellent example of leaving “old-school” institutional thinking behind and providing a dynamic, invit-ing environment to encourage interaction and learning.

The Centre’s advanced communications systems include “technology-enhanced conference rooms,” smart multimedia classrooms, video conferencing facilities, computer labs, a 300-seat lecture theatre and a digital library. The building also encourages interaction through the use of interior bridges that cross through the main hall, interconnecting the floors physically and visually.

More importantly, the building’s organizational plan and physical expression stimulate interaction. In contrast to “old-school” institutions, generally insular and often not very welcoming, this building has a visually prominent gathering space—apparent even from outside—at the main entry. This is a result of placement, spatial organization and the expansive use of view glass on the exterior.

Rozsa Centre

| University of Calgary | This gathering place and 400-seat performance space is a delightful building, specifically “regional” in its design vocabulary and at the same time understated and elegant. The building and its component parts do not attempt to make any grandiose statements, instead offering a relaxed, warm environment that invites dialogue and listening. Technical considerations alone, even if well carried out, could have created a space with great acoustical capability, “performing” extremely well for an audiophile with no interest in social interaction. But the Rozsa’s blending of technical considerations with materials selection and detailing creates a superb facility. The technical aspects of the Rozsa Centre are indeed extremely good, but the articulated wood side walls and expressed structure also achieve visual as well as acoustical richness. The materials are fundamental to the overall impact and enjoyment of the space.

Francis Winspear Centre for Music

| Edmonton | This is another acoustically wonderful space, though very different from the Rozsa Centre. Much more com-mercial, with a significantly larger main hall (1,900 seats), the Winspear is defined by its approach to design, which starts at the entry doors: the work is consistent from the point of arrival. Each element supports and enhances all the others.

(By contrast, the design of the renovated southern Jubilee most definitely does not start at the entrance. Instead of an entrance with any relationship to the now-sumptuous interior space, one arrives through rather mean-spirited, unattractive doors into what feels more like the entry to a Toronto subway station than an arts facility.)

Throughout the Winspear, a high level of attention has been paid to material and human scale. The classic “compression” of arrival within the building is welcoming and intimate, and gently leads into the expansive concert hall beyond.

The design and construction of this facility are remarkable—and rely significantly upon trust in everyone involved. The commitment of a handshake, which finds its roots in the past, might be a beneficial direction for the future: trust, validated by the achievement of a great building.

Destination Africa, Calgary Zoo

| Calgary | This grouping of several buildings at the Calgary Zoo substantially enhanced the perception of the zoo as a destination. It was a bold move by the zoo to step out of the passé display and building forms of previous eras and lead the way into the use of storytelling and education through experiential involvement. From the outside, the contemporary form and detail of the two primary buildings draw attention and captivate interest. The dramatic volumes of interior space become simply the background to the main event of “discovering” the animals within.

Centrium Office Building

| Calgary | An office building developer tries to maximize the efficiency of the floor plate, achieving the greatest amount of net rentable area while minimizing the non-rentable components such as elevator shafts. But this tower has a unique twist: one entire façade of the building leans out from the primary structure, providing a dynamic and memorable form while also creating larger floor plates higher up the building—where the rental rates are higher as well. This is a brilliant combination: trompe l’oeil and aesthetic expression are coupled with enhanced economic return for the developer. It is a simple yet exciting departure from the typical grey, boxy downtown building.

M Tech Office Building

| Calgary | This is simply a great building. The form and the presentation of materials are sophisticated, intellectual, reasoned, aesthetic and wonderfully executed. It’s a “one-off” that may be somewhat challenging to replicate as a generic office building, but it offers functional and energizing interior spaces and provides many lessons in good design. It includes offices but goes well beyond conventional, static space and offers instead a series of experiences that surprise, delight and make us think. Layout, materials and colours are used to stimulate both visual and emotional perception of space.

The public bus shelter is incorporated into the vocabulary of the building. The harmonious integration of that “amenity” is itself an example of what makes good design. Use of water within the building recognizes principles of feng shui while providing visual interest and excitement. A varied and complementary palette of materials is used appropriately for different purposes. The detailing of exterior wall finishes, the exterior glass and glazing systems—these are sophisticated, urbane and technically excellent.

Conventional thinking in the institutional world often seems predicated upon maintenance and potential damage to buildings, lowest-cost approaches and single-minded philosophy. This ends up producing schools for children that are largely windowless bunkers, that do not elicit joy and wonder and exploration—entirely missing the point of what education is really all about. The same comments apply to “old-school” university buildings, hospitals and other public buildings.

Real leadership within the development community would incorporate LEED approaches into buildings. This would be environmentally and socially responsible. Tenants and purchasers have not yet been sufficiently educated to accept the additional cost associated with such an approach. The challenge is for those who lead the process of development—and indeed the design community—to initiate, rather than waiting for public opinion, and push them along that route.

Over the last 10 years, Alberta architectural design has ma-tured, but at this point too few buildings exhibit better design. This has to do with decision-makers who prefer to be “safe” and designers who are not prepared to challenge their own comfort levels. One hopes that some of the design approaches of these 10 buildings—and the underlying decisions that allowed them to be realized—will lead to consistently better design. A more informed and better-educated public, together with visionary attitudes from key decision-makers, will ultimately produce a climate of better design. #

Peter Burgener is the senior partner of BKDI Architects and a fellow of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada.

Originally published in the Jan/Feb 2008 print edition of Alberta Views.

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