REVIEWS
The New Central Library
— Mar’ce Merrell
Architecture as reconciliation
Calgary’s newest infrastructure investment, award-winning[1] and photo-worthy, exemplifies the complexity of reconciliation. The ship-shaped structure of the Calgary New Central Library bridges geographic divides in our city– the library floats over the light rapid transit line in a feat of engineering.[2] From the main deck, downtown’s modern skyscrapers reflect off the port side windows; the East Village neighbourhood and the confluence of the Bow and Elbow rivers lie starboard. Two years after the grand opening, it’s the building’s users who shore up the library’s deficit in historical and cultural knowledge of the land, Treaty 7 territory, which the library occupies.
The ship of dreams,[3] and books, is within Instagram distance of the city’s first building, Fort Calgary, and of the rail ties that facilitated trade. The railway brought colonists and settlers out west. Sport hunters killed buffalo from the train’s windows as it crossed the prairies. The view from the Fort is like something you’d see in a Hollywood movie made in Calgary, Unforgiven or Brokeback Mountain. Buffalo stampeded here, until they were hunted to near extinction. Other species survived.
Outside the library, three alien sculptures have disembarked the ship. Nearly four stories tall, the Drinking Birds nod their heads continuously, unconsciously, dipping deep, like their toy ancestors who went by the name insatiable birdie. One tall alien greets visitors outside the terraced steps, east. The other two stand on a switchbacked gangway, port side. The sculptures wear orange, aqua, and marine uniforms, and in between dips, they appear to be surveying the new nest: Calgary City Hall to the west, the Bow River to the north, Fort Calgary and the Elbow River on the right, and the railroad, behind, to the south.
Approaching the building from City Hall or the Elbow River leads to a dramatic show: a planked ceiling of western red cedar bent into a surprise. A wooden arch extends from the ship’s midpoint to the stern. The effect is a physical echo of the span and swoosh of clouds brought by Chinook winds. It’s a step-stopper moment when you see it. A phone-grabber. They even have an official Instagram wall plaque on that swoosh of cedar.
Modern, and a nod to nature.
Like wearing a pair of heels while carrying a backpack.
Above the main deck, the skin of the mothership sparkles with hexagons, some divided, some reattached. The pattern might suggest books. Triangles could represent a coming together. The skins’ cells are white, clear, and translucent hexagonal snowflakes. It is striking. You stay with it awhile to try to figure it out the pattern. The why of it.
The Blackfoot people located and named this area as Mohkinstiss (elbow),[4] the land between the bend of the Elbow River and the banks of the Bow River. This was Siksika (Blackfoot nation) territory before the European colonists arrived. What’s known about the land prior to settler occupation continues to live through Indigenous peoples; the language, stories, and connections to architecture as shelter, representing who they are and where they are from.
The mothership wasn’t their idea. The alien birds didn’t stem from their imaginations.
The journey through the Chinook archway into the New Central library’s atrium opens into an invitation to climb the four stories of spiralling wood stairs. Stacked just a bit askew, the stairs draw the attention up to an oculus, an eye, a portal opening between ceiling and sky. The hemlock wood stairs, white walls, LED-lighting coupled with polyester fabric lounge chairs and low tables speaks “Grand IKEA” with a view.
Hundreds of photographers have descended on the library for images of the space: amateurs, influencers, newlyweds, and parents with kids spread out on the atrium’s high-school-bleacher stairs. Under the eye’s light, they focus on details of angle and sweep, what holds our attention and what sends it in a new direction.
On October 3, 2019, nearly a year after the library’s opening, Phyllis Webstad, a third-generation residential school survivor and founder of Orange Shirt Day, faced the students who filled the bleachers.
The eye above spotlighted Webstad, a grandmother wearing an orange shirt. A drum song, an honour song, had just vibrated through the building. People drew closer to the railings. Phyllis’ voice carried her story above the trickles of conversation, the clicking of keyboards.
“In our family when we turned six, we were brought to the residential school and I was no exception. Even though Granny knew that we wouldn’t be able to wear our clothes beyond that first day or that they would be taken from us, she always wanted to make sure we were presented in the best possible way. So she brought me to town. I chose a shiny orange shirt for my first day of school. I was just so excited to be a six-year old, to be a big girl, to be going to school.”
The building’s spiralling stairs imitate an inward journey, a drawing out of memories. Listeners made connections to Phyllis’ story and we set our experiences side-by-side with hers: our memories of laying out clothes ahead of the morning rush and of standing on the front steps for a photo. The body’s memory of nervousness and excitement in the gut arrived too.
A photograph of Phyllis’ family, four generations, hung on the monitor behind her. She talked about the day she arrived at residential school, the moment she stood in front of the nuns and they demanded she give them her shirt, then held out the institutional clothes with numbers inside; they numbered each of the small humans in their care.
“Pee-your-pants terror…,” Phyllis described the moment and her reaction: “Why are you taking my shirt away? Give it back to me.”
Emotion welled up inside the listeners. We have all experienced powerlessness, moments of unwanted vulnerability. We glanced at each other, looked down.
“What do you mean I have to stay here?” Phyllis asked the nuns. The assembled students stilled their movements, many sat with heads down.
When Phyllis looked up, lines of faces all along the building’s staircases reflected back at her. She must have seen the recognition from some, the sadness of others. As if she understood the truth was more important than protecting us from our discomfort, she added, “No amount of crying would convince anybody that we needed to go back home.”
Phyllis is the founder of Orange Shirt Day, a day when students all over the country wear orange shirts in remembrance of residential school.
“Our slogan, Every Child Matters, comes from this. When I was there I felt like I didn’t matter.”[5]
On October 3, 2019, the aliens among the listeners were the non-Indigenous people, some of them understanding for the first time what happened between their European ancestors and the Indigenous peoples. The truth of residential school, the thoughts around genocide, have the power to fray and rip apart connections. That day, people learned they have the power to sit with this discomfort. Perhaps they will also learn to question.
A question during the building’s construction phase, in the fall of 2017, shifted the conversation of the New Central Library mid-course. A letter from Glenna Cardinal,[6] an artist and mother from TsuuT’ina nation, to the library’s Chief Executive Officer Bill Ptacek outlined the unfair and discriminatory library policy of charging Indigenous readers on reserves the out-of-city-limits fees to be a library member; it would cost Cardinal $200 a year for her family to use the library. Her letter led to a change in the policy for all Treaty 7 Indigenous Nations; today, library use is free.[7] It also opened the dialogue for Indigenous placemaking; a step towards, perhaps, reconciliation. The Calgary Public Library began a community engagement process related to Indigenous placemaking in January 2018; the Central Library opened nine months later, November 2018.
At the library’s grand opening, among the most-liked images–a buffalo sculpture[8] standing at the top of the atrium stairs. The buffalo hide sculpted of language–words made of metal–breaks the pattern of wood and white, hexagons and ovals. The buffalo faces southwest, into the Chinook winds. It carries the language of Treaty 7 Nations.
Indigenous Placemaking at the library are art installations designed to promote educational understanding and cultural communication; these begin with the buffalo sculpture and proceed to three murals on the lobby wall. The mural’s stories by Indigenous artists[9] include images of home in the past, present, and future: landscapes, animals, human connection, ancestors, symbols. Two years later, nearly every floor of the Central Library is influenced by and contains Indigenous art, research, and artifacts. On the library’s fourth floor, a room is dedicated to Indigenous language learning, and beside it, an Elders Guidance Circle room opens opportunities for Indigenous elders to meet with each other and with library patrons.
“It is a perfect time for the library to be a leader in Indigenous relations and sharing knowledge straight from the communities,” says Jared Tailfeathers, Program Coordinator, Indigenous Placemaking. He cites the library’s role as a place of knowledge, the openness of non-Indigenous people to hear the facts and truths from the Original Peoples’ perspectives as key reasons for Indigenous Placemaking, along with keeping settlers accountable to systems designed to suppress information.
Reconciliation means to make friends again. Friends listen to each other’s stories. They repair the ruptures between them. Evidence of the friendship between Indigenous peoples and one of our first explorers covers one fourth-floor wall: as part of the story behind Hudson’s Bay explorer Peter Fidler’s map of the Blackfoot traditional territory, the Plains region of North America, we see the original map drawn by Blackfoot cartographer and trader, Ackomokki. Fidler was commissioned to find the quickest route to the west coast; he was the first European explorer the Blackfoot exchanged information with, befriended. Ackomokki’s map details the lands around the Upper Missouri river including rivers, mountains, travel times, and information about resident clans and tribes. These maps acted as a foundation for the explorers opening up the west. A history of Indigenous suffering followed, through government policy and action, and through people’s complicity and ignorance.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) focused on uncovering the truth of residential schools: a mass multi-generational abduction of Indigenous children from their homes for transplantation into boarding schools across Canada purposefully designed to erase Indigenous language, culture, people. Genocide. The TRC asks us all to take action to reconcile, to respond to the broken promises, the harm done by our ancestors. Indigenous Placemaking at the New Central Library invites all citizens to hear the stories of broken friendship and challenges us to mend these relationships. Art allows us to sit with ourselves and with various ideas for as long as we need so that we can formulate the question of, “How do I mend this relationship?”
On the second floor of the library, above the coffee shop, a library meadow opens: low-foothill shelves of adult fiction, a cityscape, and big-sky viewpoint. Symbols spiral on a nearby wall face.
Adrian Stimson’s installation, Art as Language, constructs an Indigenous worldview of Mohkinstiss, this land, in 41 symbols, from creation to climate change. Stimson’s language lifts up from the wall, stands up, in figures made of aluminum and steel, painted black. The first is a raven figure who contains symbols of seven generations of peoples. The second, a home, a tipi holds designs of constellations, a map of the earth, and the echo of ancestors. The third sculpture, an upright figure with horns, might be identified as a human in disguise.
This buffalo person could be seen as the future: suspended in the figure’s chest, a buffalo pierced by an arrow. What was done to the buffalo was done to humanity. The species collapse forced the people into starvation and dependency.[10]
Stimson carves four sweeping lines floating from the buffalo spiral towards the base, suggestive of action, perhaps, or the passage of time.
The buffalo person’s eyes have been modified or adapted, creating a science fictional or fantastical embodiment. Instead of two light and image receptors, Stimson’s alien views the world through an open rectangle, inviting us, perhaps to engage a wider lens. How might clear-eyed seeing and a heart that honours the past lead us forward?
Art as language.
Aliens with language and understanding.
Architecture as language.
“Culture developed to reconcile the contradictions posed by suffering and the pursuit of well-being.” Humans turned to wonder and awe, discovered music-making, dancing, painting, architecture and literature, to address the human drama.[11]
In Calgary, our cultures include the history of our treaties with Indigenous peoples. We are all treaty people. If the history of the land and the culture arising from the land had been in the minds of the designers, the Calgary Municipal Land Corporation’s doers and placemakers, the Central Library ship and the bird-aliens may have taken on a different appearance at the conception stage.
Honouring ancestors and respecting culture in the built form is about an approach to the environment.[12] The sense of place, not the technical aspects of the environment, are the focus. To honour the past of that place–who and what came before–people, trees, and animals may be symbolically represented in the structure but also on the poles, the landscape, and embedded into the façade.
The story of the New Central Library could have been about architecture as an act of reconciliation. Instead it is about modern architecture, engineering intelligence, the natural environment, and people within a public space; a library, attempting to bridge the gaps in knowledge and understanding. Without Glenna Cardinal's letter, we do not know if Indigenous Placemaking would exist. We are left to wonder what a building might look like if reconciliation were valued at the conception stage, embedded in the structure and character of a building, instead of existing as an afterthought.
References
[1] Time Magazine, 100 greatest places of 2019. New York Times, 52 Places to Go in 2019. Popular Mechanics, 20 of the World’s Most Stunning Libraries. The Mawsom Urban Design Award, American Institute of Architects Architecture Honour Award, Azure Magazine’s Best Canadian Architecture of the Decade.
[2] Award of Excellence in Building Engineering from the Consulting Engineers of Alberta.
[3] "This library is a springboard for dreams. Dreams have to be big in order to build a community. This is not a building, this is what we believe & it will help us dream even bigger. It's a manifesto" says @nenshi twitter feed, Mayor Naheed Nenshi, November 2018.
[4] Mohkinstiss is recognized in official land acknowledgements, on the internet, and in conversation among non-Indigenous people.
[5] Orange Shirt Day presentation sponsored by Safe and Caring Schools & Communities, October 3, 2019, Calgary New Central Library. Phyllis Webstad is founder of Orange Shirt Day.
[6] Cardinal’s work Tina Dik’iizh | clear road or clear trail, is seen in the Elder’s Guidance Circle space. A multimedia installation, 210 Chaguzagha-tsi tina in the Central Library’s atrium in October 2020 is in response to her family’s removal from their land to make way for the construction of Calgary’s new ring road.
[7] Jared Tailfeathers, Program Coordinator, Indigenous Placemaking, interview, September 11, 2020.
[8] Lionel Peyachew, Education is the New Buffalo.
[9] Roland Rollinmud, Survival Harvesting (past); Keegan Starlight, Sharing the Knowledge (Present); Kalum Teke Dan, Spiritual Changes Through Indigenous Teachings (future).
[10] “I am not at all sorry,” Sir John A. MacDonald said to Canada’s House of Commons. “So long as there was a hope that bison would come into the country, there was no means of inducing the Indians to settle down on their reserves.”
[11] Damasio, Antonio R. The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures. Vintage Books, 2019.
[12] Hyslop, Katie. “The Architecture of Reconciliation, First Nations Architect Ouri Scott Has Ideas on How Building Design Can Further Reconciliation.” https://thetyee.ca/News/2017/02/11/Architecture-Reconciliation/?platform=hootsuite&PageSpeed=noscript
Mar’ce Merrell is a settler/grandmother and interested in writing with rigour and bravery. She lives in Calgary, Alberta, Treaty 7 territory, and participated in the WriteON 2020 workshop series.