An exterior nighttime rendering shows the Arts Commons Transformation expansion’s curved form, exterior cladding, and interior finishes inspired by Alberta’s dramatic landscapes and the regional lodge typologies.Supplied
Downtown Calgary urgently needs new energy, and the city’s performing-arts centre is ready to give the city a jolt.
This week’s announcement of a historic $75-million donation from local oil executive Dave Werklund and family lets Arts Commons advance its transformation into a “campus” of two buildings linked by lively public space, a zone in which the arts are part of a larger stew of activity.
In this, Arts Commons creates an important lesson for other cities: Great urbanism can’t happen with just one building, and an urban institution must always look at what’s happening outside its walls.
Since the project was announced in 2022, it’s become larger: The arts institution took control of the adjacent Olympic Plaza, a square built for the 1988 Winter Games, and it will integrate it fully into the design and operation of the institution. The square redesign, which is in progress, is by the first-rate team of Montreal landscape architects CCXA and Toronto architects GH3 with consultants Belleville Placemaking.
Arts Commons president and chief executive officer Alex Sarian, in an interview this week, sounded most excited about the landscape portion of the project. “To have a massive outdoor space as our front door changes everything,” he said. “The plaza becomes a hub for cultural activity, free family programming and just hanging out.”
This is not normal behaviour for an arts CEO, especially one who’s about to break ground on a new showpiece building. That building, the centre of the Commons redevelopment, is a three-storey structure with a highly flexible 1,000-seat theatre and 200-seat studio theatre plus a wealth of public gathering space, all of them with doors at street level to maximize accessibility and permeability.
A rendering of Arts Commons’ new 1,000-seat theatre, set up for a rock concert. The new performance space will help meet Calgary's burgeoning demand for arts and culture venues.Supplied
The building’s design, created collaboratively by Toronto’s KPMB Architects, Calgary’s Hindle Architects and Tawaw Architecture Collective, is instantly memorable. Its southeast corner addresses the adjacent Olympic Plaza with a large publicly accessible space with a café – not a lobby, but a “lodge,” as the designers frame it. Here, a curved facade of slatted wood leans back as it rises. Framed with chunky columns of mass timber, the structure resembles something shaped by human hands, a lantern or a basket or perhaps a wigwam.
According to the architects, this came out of an effort to overcome Calgarians’ feelings that theatre is an elite activity. “We had a long discussion of how a theatre building could feel entirely welcoming and warm,” said KPMB partner Kevin Bridgman.
It also drew on Indigenous traditions, particularly the cross-cultural idea of a lodge, a collective gathering place. “The lodge is a very Indigenous concept, and it exists from east to west,” Wanda Dalla Costa of Tawaw added. “From the shed house on the West Coast to the wigwam on the East Coast and the tipi in the middle, these forms are all quite complex, but they share a ruggedness in their shapes that we wanted to evoke here.”
(The lodge also strongly recalls the unbuilt 2020 design for the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, which KPMB designed with a team including architect Omar Gandhi and Mi’kmaq artist Jordan Bennett. Ideas have a way of coming back around.)
The lodge space is punctuated by a green spiral stair and a wall of ceramic decoration patterned after decorative artwork made by local Indigenous people. Colour; ornament; texture. These are qualities that most people like, but architects often don’t. Here, they look fantastic.
The design promises to deliver on its social goals. Sarian identifies these as engaging locals with all sorts of cultural activity including robust education programs and “just to bring them in.” The emphasis on the square, and on varied informal activity, is crucial here. Most 20th-century performing-arts complexes are opaque and aloof – including the Arts Commons’ original six-theatre building, from 1985, which will be renovated later by the same design team. Such complexes “seem dead 80 per cent of the time when a performance isn’t going on,” Sarian said. “That’s not a good way to build a city. We will do things very differently.”
On their success will hinge a larger economic goal: bringing people into the downtown, which has historically been very heavy on office space and which was walloped by oil price shocks and then the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2021, office vacancies neared 30 per cent.
“Calgary’s downtown has historically not been a place where people linger, especially after 5 p.m.,” said Kate Thompson, president and CEO of the city’s Calgary Municipal Land Corp. “This campus is a place people come after five, so we’re trying to amplify that. You can’t revitalize a downtown without giving people a reason to come downtown. I think this is going to be a strong reason for people to come downtown.”
That is a lot to ask of an arts centre, and Thompson emphasized that the city has many other initiatives under way to make downtown a 24-hour place.
But even one building can make a difference in changing the atmosphere. Calgary has already seen this with its 2018 Central Library, a block away from Arts Commons. “That building was the first step toward a downtown architecture that’s welcome, and provides spaces for people to connect,” said Calgary-based Jesse Hindle of Hindle Architects. “It changed the conversation.”
The Arts Commons revitalization, he added, will advance the library’s project of civic space, “spaces that are inviting to everyone, where people will connect.”
There is strong reason to believe this will work. While the downtown has huge challenges – lots of big roads and, still, many empty buildings – Calgary is young and fast-growing. Things can change. More than a dozen office-to-apartment conversions, two of them within a block of Arts Commons, will bring new residents. And, crucially, Calgary’s city government cares about design. The city’s leadership, including Thompson, understands that beautiful places for collective experiences have value. They are some of the most valuable assets a big city has to offer, and they may even be enough to turn a city around.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to correct the name of Jesse Hindle of Hindle Architects.