Читать книгу Unbuilt Calgary - Stephanie White - Страница 9

Transportation-Driven Planning

With the presentation of a possible strategy for the development of CPR’s land holdings on 9th Avenue (they weren’t planning to leave their valuable, centralized site, no matter what the City of Calgary was thinking of), Gordon Atkins, a newly graduated twenty-five-year-old architect who had set up his own firm in 1962, reacted violently to these proposals. His alternative proposals occupy an enormous file of drawings in the Canadian Architectural Archives, including his design for the June 1963 cover of Maclean’s magazine on this topic, the re-imagining of Calgary. The CPR had hired a New York planner, R. Dowling, who proposed a plan for a whizzy, spaceship sort of figure to mark the location of the new station, something with the formal placemaking power of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, finished just five years earlier — Atkins was particularly vehement about this proposal:

These sketches show, in elevation, the transportation center centre as proposed by CPR’s planning consultant (R. Dowling of New York). The conglomeration of buildings is multi-directional, multi-functional, and so lacking in any statement of function or clear-cut unified expression that they become cartoonish and obvious.

That Atkins also protested the proposed removal of the barrier to southward development that was, and still is, the CPR main line had much to do with his personal background. He had grown up in southern Alberta, in Cardston, a Mormon town connected to the United States border and Utah by the Alberta Railway and Irrigation Company (later acquired by the CPR). Mormons had developed irrigation technology in Utah and were invited to settle 500,000 acres on the St. Mary River in southern Alberta in exchange for building an irrigation canal system, which was duly completed in 1900. The Waterways Treaty of 1909 divided the waters of the St. Mary and the Milk Rivers, and continues to plague southern Alberta to this day.[1]

Gordon Atkins understood dry land and the importance of railways and compact grid cities with tight borders, of which Cardston was one. He also had a new postwar American education (the University of Washington in Seattle), in which transportation planning figured largely, dominated by the influence of the American planner Robert Moses, who had advocated the channelling of traffic into parkways, tunnels, and interchanges since the 1930s. The major postwar adjustment in urban and suburban transportation policy was a shift from parkways, literally limited-access roads flanked by forest, to large concrete freeways hurling suburban commuters into downtown cores. Freeways into the centres of cities had become postwar planning orthodoxy, no doubt much debated in architecture and planning schools in the 1950s. Gordon Atkins was ten years younger than the Philadelphia architect and theorist Robert Venturi and started his practice just as Venturi’s 1961 book, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, was published: change was coming fast, and a young, smart architect such as Gordon Atkins would have been bursting with ideas about the complexity of making responsive and responsible urban places rather than generalized, often abstract, transportation and zoning models.

Atkins’s key drawing is of the little island that is still downtown Calgary, a tiny grid bounded on all sides that displays the potent, historic civic pattern of Calgary. To break down the barriers and allow the commercial office core to diffuse would have destroyed this heart.

As a direct critique of the 1963 City of Calgary’s proposed freeway into the downtown, necessitated by suburban neighbourhoods gobbling up farmland all around the edges of the city, Atkins proposed that 7th Avenue become a transportation corridor that put both local and regional buses, a streetcar/light rail system, the continental railway line, taxis, and bicycle lanes all in a carefully stacked section. Cars were notably absent in this proposal — it was all public transit, and without surface parking lots that still dominate the downtown core, there was lots of room for vertical expansion. What is surprising is how prescient Atkins was and how strong was his vision of a centralized, compact city that used public transit to keep its edges close. A sense of proximity at many scales is evident in the drawings: one should be able to look out of an office window and see someone at a bus stop, while a taxi goes by, and underneath is the rumble of the transcontinental train, overhead, a helicopter — it is a kind of gentle, small-town, high-modern vision of verticality.

Because everything is in its place in Atkins’s proposal, and there are no wild cards such as private cars acting erratically, the Bow River environment of trees, bushes, small animals, and pathways to the riverbank is allowed to inch up into the town. Access to this riverine environment would have been impossible with the freeway plan. For Atkins, the river is a true parkway, a fairly radical concept for the time, given that the city wanted the Bow River banks to be major roadways, something it more or less achieved with Memorial Drive on the north bank.

__________

In the spirit of 1950s urban renewal, the City of Calgary had appropriated and demolished most of the housing in the east end — an economically challenged area, as it mainly housed CNR workers for the East Calgary terminal. The City Hall, a hunched 1907 sandstone gothic building, anchored the southern corner of a new zone of institutional buildings: the library, the police station, the remand centre and court house, the Board of Education building, and the Catholic Separate Schools building across the street, all built in a three-to-four-storey béton brut style, grey and louring. Of this development, Atkins said, as only a young architect can,

The civic centre of library, police station, city hall, parking and administration building as a symbol of functional expression is a failure. Abandon all this for office space and get a new people centre at Buffalo Stadium site on the 4th street axis.

The Buffalo Stadium had been built by the Calgary Brewery in the 1930s on the south bank of the Bow River in what is now known as Eau Claire. Buffalo Stadium was made up of picnic grounds, baseball diamonds, and winter skating rinks. Despite the loss of the East Calgary residential fabric and thus the people who had used Buffalo Stadium, its site was, Atkins believed, a powerful community space already embedded with a kind of civic corpus that would have drawn power away from the old CPR landscape while remaining outside the new-but-deadly bureaucratic landscape of urban renewal around City Hall.

Through all of Atkins’s critique is a powerful affection for Calgary that allowed him to rethink the implications of the pressure to develop Calgary as a standard American city — pressure that came with the influx of the Midwestern American oil industry.

Figure 4-1. There are a number of key indications here of a 1960s Calgary urbanism. The corniced building on the left is sandstone; on the right, brick. Across the street is a low infill building very much like the Beatson Finlayson project described in chapter 39. Atkins has widened the sidewalk, narrowing the roadway to a couple of lanes, one of which is taken up by an electric bus. The downtown has babies in buggies, bicyclists, people hailing taxis, shoppers — it is a generous urban precinct.

Gordon Atkins fonds. Canadian Architectural Archives, University of Calgary. 263A/99.02, ATK A63-01.

Figure 4-2. Atkins was not happy with the sculptural nature of the New York consultants’ proposals for the CPR station site. We don’t have this original proposal, only Atkins’s response to it, which was to view such an architecture as completely alien, and in this, compared to Bill Milne’s attitude to new forms, he is deeply conservative. One could say that Gordon Atkins wanted a Calgary modernism, a Calgary urbanism, note borrowed from somewhere else with a different historical trajectory.

Gordon Atkins fonds. Canadian Architectural Archives, University of Calgary. 263A/99.02, ATK A63-01.

Figure 4-3. This little diagram reoccurs throughout Atkins’s analysis drawings. There is a historical logic here that kept the core intense and compact. Although by the 1960s it had expanded to the east, west, and north, the core was still held back from expansion to the south by the CPR main line. Removal of the tracks to the Bow River, as seen in chapter 13, to which Atkins is responding here, would diffuse the downtown core, removing its urbanity.

Gordon Atkins fonds. Canadian Architectural Archives, University of Calgary. 263A/99.02, ATK A63-01.

[1] See J.B. Hedges, The Federal Railway Land Subsidy Policy of Canada (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1934) for the outline of the Waterways Treaty.