STATUS
COMPLETED
CLIENT
Westbank Project Corporation | Telus | Allied Development Corporation
TYPOLOGY
Work, Residential
SIZE M2/FT2
70,606 / 760,000
SHARE
The Telus Sky tower creates a lively mixture of living and working in the heart of Calgary city center which has developed as a typical North American city center with a cluster of corporate towers surrounded by a periphery of low-density suburban homes.
The car is an essential part of everyday life moving in and out of the city, and the programmatic uniformity of the downtown leaves it empty at night as people return home. Situated at the intersection of light rail and arterial roads, the 60-story mixed-use tower stacks the homes on an office tower, creating a programmatically diverse building with activity throughout the day.
The office floor plates are as large as possible to maximize workspace and flexibility. The residential floor plates are slender in order to maximize daylight and views. The offices benefit from smooth glass facades, and the residences demand balconies with views and privacy.
Our design transforms from the full floorplate in the bottom half into a slender slab that stretches diagonally across the site, from corner to corner at the top.
"How do you make two different buildings with different programs and different floorplates appear like a single silhouette on the skyline? And more importantly: how do you make a 700-foot-tall building elegant?"
By remaining faithful to the orthogonality of the ground floor, the diagonal shift creates a pixelation of the façade, forming terraces and balconies for the residences.
The smooth transition from the ideal floor plate of the office, to the optimal floor plate of the residences, generates an elegantly curving silhouette.
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A network of skybridges enters where the building meets the neighboring building, an existing switching station. A vertical canyon expands the semipublic network upwards. The tiles on the wall of the adjacent façade seem to melt and peel open as pockets for plants.
Above the main entrance, the pixels of the façade extend beyond the site limits, creating a series of canopies, terraces and lounges interwoven across the corner.
At night, a 160,000 sq ft art installation ‘Northern Lights’ by Douglas Coupland lights up the north and south façades of the tower making it the largest public art piece in Calgary.
“Northern Lights draws in the public, in a similar way to a firework show. It has an amazing sense of real-time motion and energy, along with the build-up to a spectacular crescendo. BIG's TELUS Sky design is simultaneously symmetrical and curvilinear. Its twisting and mineralogical façade provided the perfect canvas to channel such a dynamic symbol of nature as the Northern Lights. For me, it was a chance to create something very analog on a system that is very digital. Like the building itself, there is an inherent contradiction, in that technology can be both a form of art as well as a tool for its creation.”
Bjarke Ingels Thomas Christoffersen Beat Schenk Jakob Lange Jan Leenknegt Julie Kaufman Bryan Hardin Douglass Alligood Gaurav Janey Benjamin Caldwell
AWARDS
Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, Best Tall Building 200m-299m, 2021 Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, Award of Excellence Winner, 2020
COLLABORATORS
DIALOG
Integral Group
Glotman Simpson Consulting Engineers
LMDG Building Code Consultants
Gunn Consultants Inc.
Bunt & Associates Consulting Engineers
Luxigon
Buda Facade Engineering Ltd.
Morrison Hershfield
RSI Studio
BIG Ideas
