SERIAL VISION

CASE STUDY - 1ST SW CALGARY ALBERTA CANADA
JMB: The following serial analysis of visual townscape from Bridge to Bridge in the Calgary downtown.
25 Ave SW Elbow Erlton Brige and Panoramic

1St SW was featured in Urban Design Calgary as a Cultural axis. We hereby analyze the serial quality of this major street.




Old CPR Rouleauville Station Footbridge and Sasso Tower
1St SW cuts through downtown's history and geographic with amongst the oldest built form, most significant, most essential and most pivotal to Calgary's history.

Old CPR Footbridge, Louisville Station, Alberta Ballet and Batistella Towers

1st ST SW is the core to downtown. It anchors other significant axes into town that secure its undisputed situation as the historic, geographic and socia-cultural centre of Calgary.


1st ST nonetheless battles the gridiron it birthed. Significant icons - Lindsay Park, St Mary's Cathedral, Warehouse district, CPR, Palliser-Grain Exchange-Post Office - The Calgary Tower anchors onto its northeast wing.



St Mary's Cathedral Steeple
Visual icons though abundant find rare opportunities through the grid. St Mary's steeple, CPR underpass dome, and Chinese cultural centre are the only markers in visual series that both organize place and distribute content about its district generic potential.



Alberta Ballet.

Content - through what Cullen coined "This and That," textures, features, land use attributes articulate the feel along 1st Street as it responds to socio-economic pressures.




Forani Building

Following 1st Street SW, Calgary re-oriented to its growing suburbs. 11 and 12 Avenue channelled south of the tracks. Downtown found a subtle split between Princes Island, Memorial Park, McLeod Trail and the Mission District. Anchored to StMary's, the Mission is still growing today.

Street Panoramic to
CPR Underpass

Battistella towers bridged a long-standing gap to Rouleauville from Downtown. The CPR underpass dome is visually aligned to StMary's Steeple to the South and linked to the Chinese Cultural Center to the North as the terminating landmark peripheral to this alignment.



CPR 9 Avenue Underpass Dome, Palliser, Grain Exchange

The pedestrian scale balances perfectly vehicular traffic and public transit. Nonetheless, vehicular and transit mobilities need reaching of age. Lifestyle it can be argued was of highest quality downtown Calgary between the cattle and oil booms that have launched Calgary persistently as an international metropolis of rank today. Urban design, at least would support that claim.





9 Ave SW CPR Underpass

Sustainability and social congruence that resolve public transit and winter city dynamics can bring the new dream of a safe, clean, prosperous and authentic urban center. It will be timed with the completion of 1st Street as Calgary's cultural axis with construction, integration, cultural diversity and social opportunities.




Front Entrance of Grain Exchange Building
The downtown post office was turned over to multi-corporate real-estate. The Grain Exchange stopped regulating Alberta's portfolios decades and a millenium ago. The Palliser is still the best hotel in town. And the tower lived up to all of its expectations and more.


Grain Exchange, PetroCanada,
In between, from the CPR underpass to Chinatown, the graduated transition in land uses and cultural heritage continues, through the Bay, the Oil district and Eau Claire.

Overall, 1st Street SW witnesses well of the challenge for the grid to grow a town into a city, even in a space as constrained as the Elbow confluence on the Bow River.


Chinese Cultural Center

We are still awaiting for closure between entrance images into the 1st ST SW alignment. You tend the seeds that make your city differently from the rows that grew your town. More like a tree, each seed needs to grow roots first and then to condition its environment.

First Street Princes Island footbridge from public parking on Bow River Escarpment.

The visions of modern architecture transformed our town with an office complement to a suburban growth to make it one of the best cities in our modern world. Restoration followed the visions.

A balance can be attained today between open space and completion of recent construction to reach of a four season corridor, walkable rive to river through a full offering of land uses in Calgary, accessible and increasingly still a beacon of culture.