Unbuilt Calgary
Описание книги
The essence of a vibrant, growing, and changing Calgary is captured over the life of its development. Calgary is a typical boom-and-bust town that was first based on ranching and farming, then oil and gas, and now energy. And energy is what its citizens have, whether for skiing, work, or construction. It is a city that leaps ahead eagerly to new futures and rarely looks back., but Calgary can also be an unsentimental city, discarding its ideas, plans, and buildings with ease. Unbuilt Calgary is a survey of 30 projects that were proposed but not realized, schemes that were situated at critical times in Calgary’s development, and proposals that indicated the city’s ambitions through its first 100 years. Unbuilt Calgary looks back to ideas and notions that might have been, and building endeavours that would have changed the shape of the city for better or worse. The 30 critical projects are accompanied by drawings and models to illustrate something of Calgary’s irrepressible exuberance.
Отрывок из книги
UNBUILT CALGARY
STEPHANIE WHITE
.....
particular projects were not built, the circumstances are as vivid today as they were thirty years ago. It is time to step back and look at some of these unbuilt projects as significant declarations of the intent to build a responsive and thoughtful city. A factor in Calgary’s development has been its relatively transient population. Many Canadians have spent a few years in Calgary, especially during its boom times, and then moved on. Too, the young average age of Calgarians indicates that not everyone stays after they retire — the Okanagan and Vancouver Island beckon. So, while the population steadily increases, there are not a lot of people, or families, who have seen the city through all its phases. People are transferred to Calgary, or come to Calgary on spec, single or with young families, and take the city much as they find it. Its past is not their past, and they share Calgary’s present but not necessarily its future.
A Laurie Anderson quotation on the hoardings outside the Performing Arts Centre when it was undergoing renovation in 2012 said something along the lines of the more we tell our stories, the more they are no longer ours, meaning that we release our stories into the world. It can also mean that stories told and retold — as is often the case in Calgary, which has a well-trodden narrative — cease to be our own real experiences. The stories here revolve around a number of quite untold architectural and planning proposals, and several over-told plans that perhaps need to be told slant. Hopefully, this book will join the shelf of previous books about the shape of Calgary that collectively make sense of this city.
.....