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In the course of our daily reporting, we often uncover unusual projects, places, or connections that don't make the final cut. Instead of keeping it to ourselves, we're pleased to share our weekly Architrivia.
Reimagined as Vienna on the Bow, the scrappy Prairie town, which had been a barren trade outpost just 20 years earlier, would have featured grand tree-lined boulevards, made whole with plenty of room for streetcars, automobiles, bicycles, and pedestrians — 'complete streets' by 21st century standards. Below, the long-forgotten CPR Station on Ninth Avenue, today home to the Calgary Tower, was but one such grand boulevard included in Mawson's fanciful designs for a new and improved Calgary.
Alas, Mawson's ambitious plans for Calgary, along with several other Canadian cities he visited during his North American tour, came to nought. Little, if any, of his grand vision was ever realized in Calgary or elsewhere. Costs were seen as exorbitant by locals at $10 million CAD, especially in a rural setting that had experienced its fair share of financial hardships, booms, and busts.
It is not without a sense of irony, however, that the car-centric, heavily suburban Calgary of today has unfolded along lines very similar to what Mawson warned against a little more than a century ago. The price today, as has been the case in Canadian cities from Vancouver to Toronto, of curbing sprawl, improving transit, adding bike lanes, and generally making a larger commitment to progressive urban planning, has increased a hundred fold since those days, leaving many to wonder "what if?"
Do you have building trivia to share? Join the conversation in the Architrivia Tipline thread in our Forum.
