Arts Commons | 18m | 4s | City of Calgary | KPMB

Holy moly they really are taking most of Olympic Plaza away. That is going to be a loss of an important public space for sure. The plaza is used for so many events, including festivals, Stampede, concerts, even the New Years Eve celebration. However, looks like this is a done deal. One option for regaining some of that space might be to redesign the plaza of the Municipal Building into something more programmable and less shitty looking?
 
Albertasaurus said:
redesign the plaza of the Municipal Building into something more programmable and less shitty looking?
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Maybe this section of Macleod should be reclaimed... (This will not happen)

Wouldn't be so hard to force all traffic to third street, which could be a one way? Third street is a bit of an alley anyways. Make everyone turn right on to 9th Ave EB and then allow up to three lanes to turn north on to third. You could still get to 6th Ave which could just be made into three lanes WB and one EB with no parking.

Reclaiming that amount of pavement would be great for Olympic plaza and open up the very cold and underused municipal plaza.
 
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Yeah definitely an unfortunate decision to take away so much space from the plaza and surround it with even more dead institutional buildings.
 
Not sure why the sudden confusion on the plaza and scale, nothing has changed from the April unveiling...this is the image we merged with @CBBarnett at the time. Bottom line, the present plaza wastes a LARGE amount of space on multilevel stairs, stages, grass beds, tree beds....it's a very inefficient and dated design. An at-grade plaza will achieve the same programmable space as the current
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They should definitely try to do a better job incorporating the plaza in front of City Hall, supposed to be something happening with the residential school children memorial there, and any change would have the fire department weigh in as their memorial is there too.
 
Tothewest said:
the same programmable space as the current
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I guess I forgot... But for me, the feeling comes from a loss of non-programmable space. The space that was a park.

In reality at times when the plaza wasn't heavily used this portion did attract loitering but when the plaza was busy this was a nice park. (Uh oh am I one of the "what about the park" people...)
 
For quite a long time (2008-2019?), Sled Island used Olympic Plaza as one of its venues. It not only used the rink for the audience, and the corridor along Stephen Ave for a beer garden, but also the "park" part for food, merch, and other vendors. People would mill about over almost the whole block, and it was a good atmosphere (if it wasn't raining, that is!). That will be swallowed by this new building.

I agree that the NW corner can go, but it's too bad they had to take the rest of it, too. Especially when there's a large parking lot right across 9th from the existing Arts Commons that could be developed.

The plaza in front of city hall is too small, has no greenery, and no opportunity to fence it off for events.
 
badc0ffee said:
For quite a long time (2008-2019?), Sled Island used Olympic Plaza as one of its venues. It not only used the rink for the audience, and the corridor along Stephen Ave for a beer garden, but also the "park" part for food, merch, and other vendors. People would mill about over almost the whole block, and it was a good atmosphere (if it wasn't raining, that is!). That will be swallowed by this new building.

I agree that the NW corner can go, but it's too bad they had to take the rest of it, too. Especially when there's a large parking lot right across 9th from the existing Arts Commons that could be developed.
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Yeah ... but also the beer garden was often shoved to the back and the fencing added to an already weird layout space for events and circulation. The current design has so much unusuable space baked into trying to cut the space off physically or visually from the streets around it via ramps, slopes and walls. This reduced the options for how the space could be used, while making everything awkward to move around and through. The poor sightlines discourages many from cutting through the park, exacerbating the loitering issues - there really is no naturally comfortable way to access any of the plaza from any direction. In short, the current plaza is poorly designed and inefficient, and it's issues aren't really related to how big it is in absolute size.

In the new design if you removed most of those physical and vertical barriers, combined with a more people-centric Stephen Ave and - god forbid - some level of car-depriorization on the 4 - 5 lane wide MacLeod Trails, and you'll find all the space you lost both in physical area but also in usage - you won't force events into weird layouts because of the chopped up space design. Events will be more accessible and the park activity will spill even easier into the surrounding areas - exactly what you'd want for a music fest.

What we want to avoid is the design issue hamstrung the Century Gardens Park rebuild on 8th Street where they kept the brutalist concrete structures for historic reasons, while failing to adapt them to contemporary demands. The result is an awkward and narrow pathway connected from 8th Street to the LRT station, on likely the single most popular route through the park. Essentially they spent all that time and money and missed one of the easiest ways to improve park usage and circulation (the rest of the park is much improved of course).
 
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Hopefully the timeline is also including the 2nd phase?? Cause if not... weak.
 
The Familia said:
Seems like an awe fully long construction timeline. Already hating that all the trees will be removed soon from Olympic Plaza. That will leave a big hole in the core for a long time….
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The arena is supposed to open by 2027 fall. They'd obviously pay less for speed compared to Scotia Place, but still 4 years for a medium sized performing arts centre seems long.
 
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