Atkins’s key drawing is of the little island that is still downtown Calgary, a tiny grid bounded on all sides that displays the potent, historic civic pattern of Calgary. To break down the barriers and allow the commercial office core to diffuse would have destroyed this heart.
As a direct critique of the 1963 City of Calgary’s proposed freeway into the downtown, necessitated by suburban neighbourhoods gobbling up farmland all around the edges of the city, Atkins proposed that 7th Avenue become a transportation corridor that put both local and regional buses, a streetcar/light rail system, the continental railway line, taxis, and bicycle lanes all in a carefully stacked section. Cars were notably absent in this proposal — it was all public transit, and without surface parking lots that still dominate the downtown core, there was lots of room for vertical expansion. What is surprising is how prescient Atkins was and how strong was his vision of a centralized, compact city that used public transit to keep its edges close. A sense of proximity at many scales is evident in the drawings: one should be able to look out of an office window and see someone at a bus stop, while a taxi goes by, and underneath is the rumble of the transcontinental train, overhead, a helicopter — it is a kind of gentle, small-town, high-modern vision of verticality.
Because everything is in its place in Atkins’s proposal, and there are no wild cards such as private cars acting erratically, the Bow River environment of trees, bushes, small animals, and pathways to the riverbank is allowed to inch up into the town. Access to this riverine environment would have been impossible with the freeway plan. For Atkins, the river is a true parkway, a fairly radical concept for the time, given that the city wanted the Bow River banks to be major roadways, something it more or less achieved with Memorial Drive on the north bank.
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In the spirit of 1950s urban renewal, the City of Calgary had appropriated and demolished most of the housing in the east end — an economically challenged area, as it mainly housed CNR workers for the East Calgary terminal. The City Hall, a hunched 1907 sandstone gothic building, anchored the southern corner of a new zone of institutional buildings: the library, the police station, the remand centre and court house, the Board of Education building, and the Catholic Separate Schools building across the street, all built in a three-to-four-storey béton brut style, grey and louring. Of this development, Atkins said, as only a young architect can,
The civic centre of library, police station, city hall, parking and administration building as a symbol of functional expression is a failure. Abandon all this for office space and get a new people centre at Buffalo Stadium site on the 4th street axis.
The Buffalo Stadium had been built by the Calgary Brewery in the 1930s on the south bank of the Bow River in what is now known as Eau Claire. Buffalo Stadium was made up of picnic grounds, baseball diamonds, and winter skating rinks. Despite the loss of the East Calgary residential fabric and thus the people who had used Buffalo Stadium, its site was, Atkins believed, a powerful community space already embedded with a kind of civic corpus that would have drawn power away from the old CPR landscape while remaining outside the new-but-deadly bureaucratic landscape of urban renewal around City Hall.
Through all of Atkins’s critique is a powerful affection for Calgary that allowed him to rethink the implications of the pressure to develop Calgary as a standard American city — pressure that came with the influx of the Midwestern American oil industry.
Figure 4-1. There are a number of key indications here of a 1960s Calgary urbanism. The corniced building on the left is sandstone; on the right, brick. Across the street is a low infill building very much like the Beatson Finlayson project described in chapter 39. Atkins has widened the sidewalk, narrowing the roadway to a couple of lanes, one of which is taken up by an electric bus. The downtown has babies in buggies, bicyclists, people hailing taxis, shoppers — it is a generous urban precinct.
Gordon Atkins fonds. Canadian Architectural Archives, University of Calgary. 263A/99.02, ATK A63-01.
Figure 4-2. Atkins was not happy with the sculptural nature of the New York consultants’ proposals for the CPR station site. We don’t have this original proposal, only Atkins’s response to it, which was to view such an architecture as completely alien, and in this, compared to Bill Milne’s attitude to new forms, he is deeply conservative. One could say that Gordon Atkins wanted a Calgary modernism, a Calgary urbanism, note borrowed from somewhere else with a different historical trajectory.
Gordon Atkins fonds. Canadian Architectural Archives, University of Calgary. 263A/99.02, ATK A63-01.
Figure 4-3. This little diagram reoccurs throughout Atkins’s analysis drawings. There is a historical logic here that kept the core intense and compact. Although by the 1960s it had expanded to the east, west, and north, the core was still held back from expansion to the south by the CPR main line. Removal of the tracks to the Bow River, as seen in chapter 13, to which Atkins is responding here, would diffuse the downtown core, removing its urbanity.
Gordon Atkins fonds. Canadian Architectural Archives, University of Calgary. 263A/99.02, ATK A63-01.
[1] See J.B. Hedges, The Federal Railway Land Subsidy Policy of Canada (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1934) for the outline of the Waterways Treaty.
Chapter 5
The Promotion of Calgary
W.G. Milne, originally from Winnipeg, moved to Calgary after qualifying as an architect following the Second World War. He, too, is an important postwar figure in Calgary: if someone said it couldn’t be done, that spurred Milne to prove that it could. He was a relentless, prolific, and effective proselytizer for a modernist Calgary. Milne and Atkins were not the only architects in Calgary, but they were the ones that appear to have generated critiques, oppositional plans, and speculative work.
Milne’s files, in the Provincial Archives of Alberta, are extensive; seemingly every letter he ever sent to the City of Calgary, to the newspapers, and to the Chamber of Commerce to suggest and promote new ideas, was saved. He suggested a tower for Calgary, one of the many projects in the run up to Canada’s Centennial year in 1967. In October 1963, Milne wrote to the editor of The Albertan, responding to an editorial about Calgary’s centennial project:
It most certainly should be something which can be admired and shown with pride; a bit of a frill, something we should not otherwise have, of some functional value and of permanent significance. It should also be visually apparent; an integral part of our day to day life and available to all. The Paris Eiffel Tower, New York’s Statue of Liberty, Stuttgart’s Tower and Seattle’s Space Needle all satisfy these requirements and, by their very height, have become architectural pivots and major features of their skylines. A Centennial Tower for Calgary could become the most important element in the city and give our growing core a dramatic accent of monumental proportions. It would be an exciting, imaginative memorial from which every citizen could see the city in its entirety and treat his visitors to a meal in a spectacular manner.
This tower could be a bold stroke which would truly catch the Calgary spirit.[1]
This last line could have been written yesterday, as the city is now engaged in a debate as to whether the white Smithbilt hat is still an appropriate symbol of the Calgary spirit. The 2011 rebranding of the city uses the phrase “Calgary,