For decades as central cities sprouted skyscrapers and other tributes to the corporate world, they have been abutted by neighborhoods left behind and decaying. This is true in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, a fast-growing city driven by the energy sector. The downtown sits adjacent to the East Village neighborhood, which is quickly gentrifying. Between the two, serving as a bridge, now sits the 240,000-square-foot Calgary Central Library, a highly anticipated building that lives up to the excitement generated when the design was open to competition in 2013.
A new library bridges two neighborhoods and establishes a community center for learning
Photo: Michael Grimm Photography Inc.
A View Within
The shape of the building, an oval that sits above a light-rail station, creates the sense of a portal, but it was the façade that caught the judges’ eyes. “It’s a playful use of exterior cladding, and creating a pattern,” says Douglas V. Pierson, AIA, LEED AP, BD+C, co-founder, architect and design principal, pod architecture + design, Chapel Hill, N.C. “And the pattern becomes a very large-scale expression of the façade throughout the building. It contrasted nicely with the conditions around the site.”
Photos: Michael Grimm Photography Inc.
Calgary-based DIALOGjoined with Norwegian architecture firm Snøhetta to win the competition for the $183 million project with DIALOG serving as the architect of record. Throughout construction, the designers and construction teams faced some unique challenges, including a tight, oddly shaped site and having to build on top of a rail system.
Because the building sits above the light rail, the entrance is raised well above street level, making additional challenges to incorporating the structure into the neighborhood. The designers addressed that by carving out an entryway clad overhead in cedar planks that contrast, and soften a façade that fluctuates from sparkly, opaque white panels to crystal-clear glazing.
In the right-angled city environment, the gentle, ship-like curve of the building sets it apart, making its role of joining two neighborhoods more obvious. It’s an opening, not a wall. The façade’s varied use of opaque, translucent and transparent panels picks up on that, so that the building seems to be a rupture in the city skyscape revealing the hidden, secret life within.
A Tight Site Challenge
Alexander Seegerer was project manager for the wall system fabricator and installer, Ferguson Corp., Calgary. His team needed to work with the difficult Photos: Michael Grimm Photography Inc. site conditions and meet the design challenges of installing 460 unitized panels. Each panel is rectangular and comprised of glazing or Mitsubishi Chemical Composites America Inc.’s ALPOLIC metal composite material (MCM) coated in a custom FEVE finish in three separate white colors. The aluminum extrusions from APEL Extrusions, Calgary, and Hydro Extrusions North America, Portland, Ore., used for making the framework for the panels were coated with four separate colors from PPG Industries Inc., Pittsburgh.
From the beginning, “They were always going to be MCM panels,” says Seegerer. “Every panel was different. There were all kinds of rectangular shapes. It was like a jigsaw puzzle with multiple different glass types and three colors of panels. We spent a lot of time in drafting and engineering to make it work. They were like Lego components to putting together the unitized panels.”
The panels were built into large rectangular frames that varied in size, but on average were about 10 feet wide and 18 feet tall. The largest was 18 feet wide and 33 feet tall.
From the beginning, “They were always going to be MCM panels,” says Seegerer. “Every panel was different. There were all kinds of rectangular shapes. It was like a jigsaw puzzle with multiple different glass types and three colors of panels. We spent a lot of time in drafting and engineering to make it work. They were like Lego components to putting together the unitized panels.”
The panels were built into large rectangular frames that varied in size, but on average were about 10 feet wide and 18 feet tall. The largest was 18 feet wide and 33 feet tall.
Fortunately, Ferguson’s manufacturing facility was about a half hour away from the site, which solved what could have been significant staging problems on the tight, urban building site. “We loaded two 50-foot trailers in our yards,” says Seegerer. “There were 18 panels to a trailer and we could fit two trailers on the site.”
Crews could work on both sides of the building simultaneously. They hung the panels from large steel fins attached the roof trusses and fit into a shoe on the bottom. “With all the weight hanging off the roof truss, the camber came out of them. It’s never quite exactly what the engineers calculate, and we jacked up each panel individually to position it correctly.”
As if the site conditions weren’t difficult enough, the team also needed to install dampeners to prevent vibrations and noise from passing trains to get amplified by the panels and spread throughout the building. In essence, every panel needed to be isolated. From initial design mock-ups through fabrication to completed installation the project lasted approximately 18 months.
“It was a fun project,” says Seegerer. “Very challenging. It was a short period of time for a project of that magnitude with a lot of technical challenges. It was very rewarding.”
