Hi everyone, Mark Iype in Edmonton today.
Welcome to the first edition of the Alberta-specific newsletter.
As The Globe’s Alex Bozikovic said this week, “Downtown Calgary urgently needs new energy, and the city’s performing arts centre is ready to give the city a jolt.”
This week, we reported that Alberta businessman Dave Werklund and his family are donating $75-million toward the modernization and expansion of the city’s Arts Commons performing and visual-arts complex, one of the largest philanthropic gifts in Canadian arts history.
The downtown hub has been raising $660-million for an ambitious transformation project that will upgrade the existing facility, while also adding a new building and redesigning the neighbouring outdoor Olympic Plaza. Werklund’s gift gets Arts Commons to just over three-quarters of its fundraising goal.
In an interview with The Globe’s Josh O’Kane, Werklund said he hoped the gift would strengthen the city by expanding the public’s understanding of the arts, which he said has enriched his own life.
“Everything has to do with the arts,” he said. “I believe in the arts so strongly.”
In recognition of the donation, Arts Commons will be renamed Werklund Centre next year.
“A gift of this magnitude will be a gesture of confidence to others, who may never have given to the arts, that this is about city building,” said Alex Sarian, Arts Commons’s president and chief executive officer.
The new building is scheduled to open by the 2028-29 season and will include a 1,000-seat theatre and 200-seat studio theatre, boosting the complex’s cumulative seating capacity by about 45 per cent.
The design of the building was done collaboratively by Toronto’s KPMB Architects, Calgary’s Hindle Architects and Tawaw Architecture Collective, and is one that Bozikovic describes as “instantly memorable.”
According to the architects, the desire was to build something that worked to overcome the feeling that theatre is an elite activity, while also drawing on Indigenous traditions, particularly the cross-cultural idea of a lodge, a collective gathering place.
“We had a long discussion of how a theatre building could feel entirely welcoming and warm,” said KPMB partner Kevin Bridgman.
The larger economic goal for the city of course is to bring more people into the downtown and to get them to stick around into the evening.
“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,” said Kate Thompson, president and CEO of Calgary Municipal Land Corp.
With apartment conversions happening in neighbourhood office buildings around the cultural hub, the award-winning public library a block away and a young and fast growing population, there is real hope that revitalization is well on its way.
“It’s going to be an incredible draw for people,” said Mayor Jyoti Gondek.
This is the weekly Alberta newsletter written by Alberta Bureau Chief Mark Iype. If you’re reading this on the web, or it was forwarded to you from someone else, you can sign up for it and all Globe newsletters here.