PHOTO ESSAY
imagining The alternative—Hailey Darling
Architectural interventions transforming a city centre into a diverse, dynamic and vibrant quarter
The City of Calgary downtown: cite plan with intervention
01 Parking lots+Parkades/ 02 Vacant office spaces/ 03 Lobbies and streets/ 04 Unused Building Rooftops/ 05 Plus Fifteen Pedestrian Walkway
01 Parking lots + Parkades As of 2016, there were approximately 53,000 parking stalls in downtown Calgary, which is about 1 parking stall for every 3 people who work in downtown. Currently, in the downtown area, there are 24 parkades and 58 surface lots.
Parking lots + Parkades: Re-designated for Industrial Land Use Implementing industrial land use to encourage services that typically exist on the outskirts of the city, such as warehouse wholesalers, distributors, craft breweries, auto shops and manufacturing plants to utilize the vacant space in the core.
02 Vacant office spaces Downtown Calgary office market currently contains an inventory of 42.3 million square feet across a total of 148 buildings. The office vacancy rate in downtown Calgary is currently just under 27per cent.
Vacant office spaces: Re-designated for Commercial Land Use Commercial land use is implemented to encourage services that typically exist in suburban areas such as large box stores, shopping malls and strip malls to utilize vacant office space, rather than continue to sprawl into suburbia.
03 Building Lobbies at ground level Many of the buildings downtown contain expansive ground level lobby spaces. Very little of them serves a specific function besides housing elevator lobbies, security desks and receptionist desks to name but a few.
Under-utilized building Lobbies: Re-designated for Residential Land Use Residential land use is implemented at the base of buildings in an effort to bring a new typology of housing to downtown, which does not follow the typical trend. Currently the majority of downtown living is composed of high-rise condo buildings.
04 Rooftops Downtown Calgary office market currently contains a total of 148 buildings. Accordingly, there are 148 rooftops, and the majority of them do not to have any function.
Unused rooftops: Re-designated for Agricultural Land Use A variety of agricultural uses to be implemented to diversify the area, such as urban food growth, orchards, nurseries, garden centres and livestock faming.
05 Plus Fifteen Walkway System In the downtown area, there are 16km of sheltered pedestrian walkways connecting many of the buildings. The connecting bridges have been titled ‘Plus fifteens’ due to their location fifteen feet above the street level. There are 83 bridges in total.
Plus Fifteen Pedestrian Walkway: Re-designated for Recreational Land Use Implementing recreational land use to transform the Plus Fifteen into the world’s longest indoor walking track with way-findings on the ground and informational signages, encouraging people to utilize the amenities and expansive network for exercise throughout.
A section of downtown, with all new land use implemented
Throughout the past year, the world has been witness to a severe decrease in the need for workplaces in metropolitan regions. For Calgary, this decrease actually started in 2014 when the city experienced unprecedented metropolitan vacancy rates due to economic difficulties.
The project presented seeks to imagine alternative uses for infrastructure in the Calgary downtown to be achieved primarily through challenging the monotony of zoning policies that currently exist in the area. Developed as a series of strategies that could bring diversity to downtown land zoning and re-purpose existing infrastructure, the project is a hypothetical attempt to ensure the metropolis continues to be used rather than fall into urban disrepair.
Calgary’s economy has always relied heavily on the production of fossil fuels.[1 ]Due to the immense prosperity and rapid economic growth experienced in the city from 2010 to 2014, the Calgary downtown area realized its highest expansion in history, with ten million square feet of skyscrapers being rapidly erected; seventy-three per cent of those skyscrapers were intended to accommodate the oil and gas industry.[2]
As a result of the economic boom, the Calgary Metropolitan Region rapidly become home to Canada’s second highest number of corporate head offices next to Toronto.[3] However, this rapid expansion of Calgary’s commercial core came to an abrupt halt when oil prices collapsed in late 2014. In Calgary alone, one in four office workers lost their jobs and office space for one quarter of the workers downtown was no longer needed.[4] Within the time frame of approximately eighteen months, the metropolitan core went from near zero percent vacancy to over twenty-four percent.[5]
Currently, the downtown Calgary office market contains an inventory of over forty-two million square feet across a total of one hundred and forty-eight buildings.[6] With people continuing to vacate offices to work from home, the vacancy rate has increased recently to the highest it has ever been, at thirty percent. "It now appears that Calgary's downtown will cross into unseen territory for a modern, major office market in Canada within the next twelve to twenty-four months," says the Avison Young Calgary Office Market Report for the fourth quarter of 2020.[7]
Following a keen understanding of the urban phenomenology, as well as municipal development plans and by-laws that currently exist for Calgary’s downtown, a series of architectural interventions were identified based on the lack of zoning diversity in the area.
Five underused downtown spaces were chosen for land use re-designation. These include parkades, vacant office space, large expansive lobbies, unused rooftops and the extensive Plus Fifteen Pedestrian Walkway system. Rather than focus on short-sighted residential conversions and repetitive varying office typologies, this project instead ventured to re-imagine existing land uses of the infrastructure. Hypothetical land use re-designations were implemented at each of the four sites to encourage alternative demographics to use the infrastructure in the region, resulting in Calgarians once again populating the emptying city centre.
The drawings are representations of a highly imagined Calgary Metropolitan region — one in which the monotony of corporate office space is manipulated to embrace land-use change, transforming the region into a diverse, dynamic and vibrant quarter of our city.
Bibliography
[1] “Economy of Alberta,” April 6, 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Alberta
[2] Cattaneo, Claudia. “Vacant Skyscrapers Are an 'Albatross' That Canada's Oil Capital Can't Shake off Too Soon.” financialpost. Financial Post, June 22, 2017. https://financialpost.com/real-estate/property-post/vacant-skyscrapers-are-an-albatross-that-canadas-oil-capital-cant-shake-off-too-soon
[3] Varcoe, Chris, Danielle Smith, Robert Miller, Calgary Herald, and Licia Corbella. “Home: Calgary Herald.” calgaryherald. Accessed April 16, 2021. http://www.calgaryherald.com/business/Calgary+head+office+second+only+Toronto/6548282/story.html
[4] “Pinning down a Number on Oilpatch Layoffs | CBC News.” CBCnews. CBC/Radio Canada, July 6, 2016. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/oil-patch-layoffs-how-many-1.3665250
[5] Cattaneo, Claudia. “Vacant Skyscrapers Are an 'Albatross' That Canada's Oil Capital Can't Shake off Too Soon.” financialpost. Financial Post, June 22, 2017. https://financialpost.com/real-estate/property-post/vacant-skyscrapers-are-an-albatross-that-canadas-oil-capital-cant-shake-off-too-soon
[6] “Conversions Won't Solve Calgary's Office Vacancy Issue: Experts: RENX - Real Estate News Exchange.” RENX, December 27, 2019. https://renx.ca/office-conversions-calgary-few-far-between/
[7] O'Brien, Frank. “Energy Mergers Push Calgary Office Vacancies into Stratosphere.” Western Investor, January 25, 2021. https://www.westerninvestor.com/news/alberta/energy-mergers-push-calgary-office-vacancies-into-stratosphere-1.24272605
All Images: Courtesy of artist
Hailey Darling is a Calgarian whose work has extended from Winnipeg, Canada to London, England. She has professional and academic experience in several realms and scales of design. Most recently, Darling received a Master of Architecture from McGill University. She is currently located in Calgary.