U.K. architect Will Alsop with some ideas for Cowtown
Will Alsop has made a name for himself by tearing down walls: walls of homogeneity walls of mundanity and walls of ordinary. It is what he puts up in their place however that is his calling card. Alsop is one of Britain’s most celebrated awarded and controversial architects and urban planners an artistically motivated sculptor of city spaces whose guiding principal in design is the notion that joy and vitality must be allowed to seep from his work. Alsop is the architect who operates primarily as artist as opposed to the architect who operates primarily as engineer. His buildings tend to leap out of the greyscape of the city into the imagination of the viewer; anyone that has seen his work will remember it. Alsop is mostly active in the U.K. where he is responsible for a number of vibrant colourful and modernist buildings but the architect has also won awards in Canada for Toronto’s Sharp Centre for Design; a black-and-white checkered expansion to the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD) that sits perched above the original art school’s campus on coloured stilts. Alsop was recently in Calgary his third visit to speak at a fundraiser that featured one of his paintings as an auction item. Perhaps as well known for his outspoken nature as he is for his unique design Europe’s bad-boy architect didn’t pull any punches as he took some time out of a very busy schedule for an amiable open discussion on Calgary. Will Calgary ever have a role to play architecturally and design-wise on a global level? Well no not really. Calgary is a victim of small-town thinking. Unless that changes Calgary will always seem a small town to visitors. Unfortunately the city is one big suburb. You can’t continue to make subdivisions farther and farther away from the core and expect to have a vibrant city. Most people get off a plane and beat a well-trodden path to Banff and the mountains. I think many here would hope the city can grow to incorporate what you feel we are missing. How can Calgary better evolve? Well stop making subdivisions farther and farther away from the core! You need to use the oil wealth to beautify the city. The money’s there. But there are problems in Alberta — its so redneck. Calgary is almost criminally conservative — you have a collection of people that are in positions of power that dictate what the city looks like and how the city grows. You pride yourselves on democracy yet ideas can’t seem to get through. It’s almost like the serf system from medieval England there’s no sharing in the shaping of the city. As an example in 2005 I designed a building in a contest in Edmonton for the Art Gallery there and the jurors unanimously chose it as the winner yet the entrepreneur that was funding the project had a blatant disregard for culture and for the democratic process and just usurped that and picked another finalist. There is a growing population in Calgary that would like to see a less conservative approach to a number of things in the city. Do you see a world-class structure like the Foster and Partners’s Bow skyscraper as a potential spark for the city’s future built space? Even the Foster’s building that is going in is reigned back from the type of work that Foster and Partners has done elsewhere — it’s not really a standout Foster design is it? I suspect that doing work in Calgary means being somewhat handcuffed and I think that’s what might be the case there. What would you do here? You need someone or a collection of someones to come in and do a shopping list for the city where the sky is the limit. Do a 10- to 20-year vision exercise and think big. I went for a walk up above the city on Crescent Road and it was a nice path not great but not bad. Imagine if you could dam the river below there — all that’s immediately below there is a highway system anyway. Do this and you would give the flood waters a place to go alleviating that problem and you could create a beautiful central park area for the city. The steep slopes below the millionaire’s row that is up there now could be developed into lakefront residential property and the existing property would be even more valuable. A lake seems pretty grand. Any chance that you might just design a building here? We’ve done exactly that plan before built a lake in the U.K. and it worked great. Calgary needs to take a risk with the urban fabric — the onus is on politicians and leaders to grasp the mettle otherwise Calgary will disappear into obscurity. The only thing there is the oil — if that goes you’ll have a ghost town of ghettos and social problems with people out of work. To avoid that you need to try to create other elements that keep people there and keep people working there. If every person that came through Calgary to get to Banff stopped and spent just two nights in the city consider the boost in tourism revenue. Downtown Calgary could use more mixed use and better density. I would take out the first five floors of all the office spaces downtown and throw all that back to public use — some of the streets would hang together much better. There was talk of moving some of the cultural facilities downtown too and that would help. Moving the Alberta College of Art and Design to the core would mix things up a bit. I could design it! I’d love to design it. You designed the OCAD expansion in Toronto. What was that like? How far behind Toronto is Calgary? To be honest I didn’t think that they would go for it but they did and it’s been awarded by the city for its design. Toronto is progressing Calgary is 15 to 20 years behind where that city is today and likely won’t ever catch up unless more initiative is taken. The politicians in Calgary should take a cue from Toronto and not fear change so much. Change makes money and makes for a more interesting city.
