Olympic Plaza

Abstract

Purpose: To design an urban centre for Calgary that: (1) acts year-round as the heart of the civic area of the downtown. (2) acts as the centre for outdoor festivities during the XV Winter Olympic Games, February 13 to 28, 1988, as well as the location for the nightly medal presentations. (3) acts as a setting for and interacts with, both visually and functionally, the adjacent significant public institutions: the City Hall, the Municipal Building and the Calgary Centre for the Performing Arts Focus: Quite obviously, the focus of this project is on urban space and, more specifically, on urban space in downtown Calgary. The functional requirements of the project have been drawn from the brief program issued by the City of Calgary for Olympic Plaza and expanded, both to address the addition of the Dominion Bank Building to the problem and to explore a full range of activities to enliven the plaza, into a full program document. The spatial problems associated with locating a plaza on a block which had been previously built-up, as well as other site conditions, are examined in a comprehensive urban analysis. These two sections, when combined with an image study of the adjacent buildings, should address the issues of this project which are specific to Calgary. However, on a more elementary level, this project deals with the three most basic constituents of urban form/space: the street, the square and the building as it relates to open urban space.