The TransAlta Call Centre, now occupied by EPCOR, designed in 1998 by Craig Gilbert when he was with Culham Pedersen Valentine, is also located in a box building landscape — the industrial-commercial park hinterland that is north- east Calgary. Seen as an undistinguished, open setting, there was a feeling that they could do whatever they wanted here. In a step down from the stainless steel precision of CPV’s Nova Building of the early 1980s, the use of galvanized steel and aluminum gives the building a brittle sort of edge that appeared tougher than the firm’s usual work. As Fred Valentine sees it, the building used rougher materials with more discipline, less taste, more adventure. This project raised the bar for that kind of district and that kind of build- ing — the call centre typology not immediately springing to mind, this one will serve as a serious beginning. It also raised the bar within the firm updating CPV’s high tech iciness into something more contentious. There are two peripheries here, one so geographically remote that skill sets, materials and schedules allow no slack in the architect’s management of the project; the other not so distant in miles, but psychologically remote from the scenographies imposed on urban environments, allowing a different kind of rigor. Rather than fobbing off these distant sites with quick conventional buildings thinking no one will ever see them, the sites are treated as serious, independent countries with the potential for a new world architec- ture. The resources of the centre, in the form of two well respected, well established architectural practices, are sent to the periphery and return, changed.
these pages:TransAlta Call Centre, 1998. Culham Pedersen Valentine Architects, Calgary, Alberta
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