O O Ø O O O O
Stephen Avenue Trees
They are infamous in Calgary. The parliament of steel trees growing out of the 300 West Block, at the end of Stephen Avenue Mall.
They come to us by way of the Cohos Evamy Partnership, courtesy of TrezecHahn Corporation, as means of public payment for being allowed to build the second 50-storey Banker’s Hall tower.
Iconic, just like the Calgary Tower.
Humorously, the trees were announced with the following fanfare:
The whole block will be a new icon and meeting place in Downtown—just like the Calgary Tower and Olympic Plaza have become. The streetscape renovations will create a unique sense of place.
Har har.
Any Calgarian who has walked past their towering forms realizes this descriptions is purely wishful thinking. They have not become icons, and they certainly aren’t a meeting place. The sculptures themselves are interesting enough, and their lyrical intent is well received, but they are awkwardly placed, and just so darned big. The resulting public space at their feet is unwelcoming and unsuccessful.
The argument is that 80 feet of height is required to mitigate against the 50+ storeys of Banker’s Hall. Fine. (Although I suspect that their height is more a function of making the scale model look well-proportioned, rather than any concern about their relationship to the building at ground level.) Even so, if the trees must be large, why do they have to meet the ground with no sense of scale to the people beholding them?
To feel engaged at the street level, pedestrians need to observe smaller details, which they can understand in relation to their bodies. They need to be able to touch them, to make massive objects approachable.
The trees’ bases—ten-foot green, riveted steel shoes—fail to reduce their scale to a comprehensible size, and they are the last thing on the block against which you would want to place your hand.
This being the pd.o, where we promise simple answers to complex problems, here is my solution: Make the structures more approachable by renovating the trees’ bases to include integrated seating.
Aren’t there already benches at their bases? Yes, but they serve an entirely different purpose. The existing furniture provides passers-by a temporary place to sit. My notional benches are meant to humanize these outsize structures, while providing the mechanism by which the trees can participate in the streetscape. Also, they wouldn’t be synthetic faux-wood afterthoughts.
Last year, I had the unalloyed pleasure of living in Bologna, Italy for a month, with the purpose of studying private contributions to public space. No one builds public spaces like Europeans in general, and Italians in particular. In Bologna’s Piazza Maggiore—the main square—there is a similarly large structure, Basilica San Petronius, which towers over the public space in front of it. Its facade however, decreases in scale from the upper undressed brick to the lower courses of marble, and finally terminates in the profile of a seat, which runs along its entire front elevation.
Piazza Maggiore, Bologna
The Bolognese inhabit this structure, and infuse it with life. Many people meet there, or eat there, or sleep, or read their newspapers on this public bench. The base of the basilica has a public presence about which the makers of the Stephen Avenue trees can only fantasize. The basilica does not abruptly meet the ground, nor is there street furniture pushed up against it. The building is the furniture.
To put a fine point on it, this:
Is very different from this:
My point is a very positive one. The trees are great, for their structural exhuberance,and their joyous wastefulness. Let’s now make them relevant to pedestrians, by rehabilitating their bases, so passers-by will feel less like insects scurrying underfoot, and more like engaged citizens in a sympathetically built environment.
Does this make you exhuberant?
When we’ve done this much, we can then turn our attention to the TD-Centre-Banker’s Hall +15 walkway, which must be removed—or at least raised or buried—so Stephen Avenue isn’t prematurely visually terminated by its overhead mass.
But that’s a battle for another Tuesday.
Evan Spence
October 25, 2005
OOØOOOODCCXXVII
October 25th, 2005 at 5:28 pm
I just HAD to see what these things really looked like. http://reborn-by-design.com/photolog/photolog-0855.html
October 26th, 2005 at 12:49 pm
Whoop, sorry. I meant to link that in there somewhere. Thanks for doing that.
October 27th, 2005 at 11:26 am
I love your sketches but I was disappointed, I wanna see your sketch of the integrated seating!
Also, is it just an urban myth or were the “trees” not put there to help prevent the wind tunnel affect once Bankers Hall gold version was put up?
I would also recommend you visit the front of the TCPL building to gaze in wonder at the umm…fossil(?) statue. While not in the same scale as the trees, it evokes a similar thought. “WTF?”
October 27th, 2005 at 6:06 pm
Is that what it is?
I thought some giant-robot-dinosaur died there…
October 30th, 2005 at 9:44 pm
Giant robot dinosaurs can also become fossils.
I like TCPL fossil (I also quite like the building), and I don’t think it’s at all detrimental to the scale of life at the street. That said, I walk past it way less, so I’m not terribly familiar.
Mr. Steen, I didn’t draw an integrated seat because I didn’t want to bring style into the debate. I’m not concerned with what it looks like, just that its form is there, playing role at the sidewalk level.
Also, I’m a little lazy, and design is hard.
I will once again reiterate that I think the trees themselves are quite beautiful, but the point at which they meet the ground needs to be remediated.
Although they were sold as such, they have done little to mitigate the wind tunnel effect on that block.
October 31st, 2005 at 5:05 pm
Their intended wind-tunnel curtailment is no myth…and in fact, is the key to understanding how these “sculptures” — which never seem to be connected to a named artist — got approved in the first place.
According to the May 29, ‘99, Calgary Herald, the trees “aren’t being erected for purely esthetic reasons. …If the design works, the mesh will shatter the channel, and the wind — in theory — should turn into a riffle, sliding down the sides of buildings.” A sizable scale model of the avenue was even hydrodynamically tested (at great expense) to develop, prove, and refine this theory. “Sculptures,” indeed!
I’d also love to see sketches of your proposed solution…and I’m equally curious about your insistence that your integrated seating “wouldn’t be synthetic faux-wood afterthoughts.” What type of afterthoughts would you prefer?