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Preface

Writing this book has been an interesting process. It isn’t the book I started out to write, but as it developed, the importance of land and landscape came to the fore in what is often considered to be a very tough city. I have become aware of the distance between underlying values and public relations. What impressed me is how many ideas are still being developed today that appeared in plans made at Calgary’s very beginning.

Both sides of my family came to Calgary during the wheat boom as British immigrants; my mother’s grandfather was busy flinging together small houses in Albert Park in 1909, just at the end of the wheat boom and its associated real estate bubble. Another grandfather surveyed the layout of the Stampede racetrack on his honeymoon in 1907. As children, both my parents lived on the same street, 18A Southwest, on the edge of the city — beyond was prairie and buffalo wallows, and the endless summers of the Depression.

I worked in Calgary during the architectural boom in the late 1970s and early 1980s; like so many after it crashed, I left to find work elsewhere. One can be most nostalgic about Calgary and the landscapes of southern Alberta when one no longer lives in it, so much so that I eventually wrote a doctoral dissertation about how modernism in architecture and planning hit the landscapes of Calgary, and how Calgary bent it to fit.

It is repeated several times throughout the text about how easily unbuilt projects were discarded — the drawings and all the accompanying files. The architects are long gone, and there is no one to ask anymore. However, those drawings that were found — ink and pencil on paper — can be terrifically eloquent, and so we must thank the generations of draftsmen, designers, and architects who had so many ideas about how to live well, and how to live well in the city.

Linda Fraser, of the Canadian Architectural Archives at the University of Calgary, has been extraordinarily helpful, as have Lindsay Moir of the Glenbow Museum Archives; Iris Morgan of the Maps, Academic Data, Geographic Information Centre at the University of Calgary; and Carolyn Ryder of the Community Archives of the Calgary Public Library.

Tom Martin, Gerald Forseth, Dan Jenkins, Manfred Grote, Karl Pokorny, Ali Famili, Barry Johns, Bob Ellsworthy, Rick Balbi, David Lachapelle, and Darrel Babuk all took the time to discuss Calgary and their work in it, and to them I am very grateful. Not all the projects I looked at have been included, but they were all thought about and their circumstances and ideas incorporated somewhere in the text, even if not by name.

I would like to acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and its Alberta Creative Development Initiative program for the research portion of this project.