Cantos announces winner for King Eddy design
Nancy Tousley
Calgary Herald
September 23, 2009
Allied Works Architecture, of Portland, Ore. and New York City, with BKDI of Calgary, is the winner of an international architectural competition to design the new National Music Centre at the King Eddy, it was announced today by the Cantos Music Foundation.
Brad Cloepfil, the firm’s 54-year-old founder, said he was thrilled to win the $100 million project, which offers a once-in-a-career opportunity: to invent a new kind of institution, a museum for the 21st century.
“The initial thing that caught my eye was the complexity of the vision in the description of what the National Music Centre aspired to be,” Cloepfil said. “It was so many different things, it was like nothing I had ever heard of, no nameable institution. It’s not just a museum, it’s not just performance space. It has this crazy blues club associated with it. It was quite a far-ranging vision.”
“To be a part of inventing a new institution, that’s something you don’t encounter. A lot of times you get to reconceive an institution, but to really invent one, which is what we’re doing, that touches on so many parts of music at once and concentrate it into some sort of cohesive place in Calgary is an amazing challenge.”
Cloepfil and 65 other international architectural firms answered the call for expressions of interest (EOI) sent out by the Cantos Music Foundation, which is transforming itself into the National Music Centre. The building program called for incorporating the historic King Edward Hotel, which became a legendary blues bar known fondly in Calgary as the King Eddy, until the building was condemned in 2004.
If all goes according to plan, the King Eddy component of the project, a live music venue and lounge, will be completed first, in time for the 100th anniversary of the Calgary Stampede in 2012.
Allied Works was chosen from a shortlist of top international competitors: Diller Scofidio + Renfro, New York, with Kasian, Calgary; Ateliers Jean Nouvel, Paris, France; Saucier + Perrotte, Montreal; and Studio Pali-Fetke, Los Angeles. All five architects presented their proposals at a public event at the Grand theatre on July 23.
Cloepfil’s proposal envisions a five-storey building designed as a series of “resonant vessels” or instruments orchestrated by the collections and programs of the new building.
“We really do see the building as an instrument,” Cloepfil said last July. “The body of the building is designed and detailed to refer to instrument cases, while the freer forms of the interior are influenced by acoustics. Entering an exhibition gallery, a visitor will activate a threshold of sound, there will be ambient sound throughout and an interactive acoustical area where visitors can make sound with their bodies. Silence will also be present as an important element of the soundscape.”
The new building also refers to the western landscape with canyons of space in its interior and an exterior clad with visually rich material that could possibly be stone veneer.
“There is a monumentality to the design that is intended to evoke the spirit of place,” said Cloepfil, who is known for the influence of the landscape on his work.
The National Music Centre at the King Eddy, to be located in the East Village, will comprise a collection of musical instruments that ranges from harpsichords to electronic keyboards, spaces for performance and education, a recording studio and a radio broadcast facility for the radio station CKUA.
Cantos needs to raise $75 million for the capital cost of the building and another $25 million for an operating endowment.
Allied Works was a frontrunner in the competition from the beginning, said Andrew Mosker, executive director of the Cantos Music Foundation.
“I would say Allied Works, better than any other firm, going back to the EOI phase, has been able to distill the true essence of our project. All 66 of those EOIs were spread out on the project room table and Allied Works’ was the first one I read, for no particular reason.
“I remember the first thing that struck me about their EOI was the way they addressed every single aspect of the project. The vision and understanding of what we wanted to build, their related experience with cultural, and particularly music museum, projects.”
“I think that they, better than anyone else, truly understand the vision we are trying to create here at the National Music Centre at the King Eddy. It’s a new way of looking at cultural buildings, music museum collections and programs all tied into one. It is truly the museum of the 21st century.”
Among the other commissions Allied Works has won through international design competitions are the Booker T. Washington School for the Performing and Visual Arts, Dallas, Texas; the Museum of Arts and Design, New York; the Clyfford Still Museum, Denver, Colo., and the Walt Disney Animation, Pixar Animation Studios, Los Angeles and Emeryville, Calif.
Allied designed the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, the University of Michigan Museum of Art, and the 12-storey expansion of the Seattle Art Museum, which was added to a building designed by Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates.
The public favourite in an online survey was the proposal by Studio Pali-Fetke, Los Angeles.
Mosker said Cloepfil’s experience in designing cultural buildings, the expert team he has put together, which includes exhibition designers who worked on the Stax Museum of American Soul Music, and the chemistry between architect and client, were all considerations the led to choosing the AlliedWorks proposal.
Cloepfil was able to sum up the soul of the project, Mosker said, in “a place that people can return to and that didn’t invade the space it is in but complemented its surroundings. Movement is away from large-scale architecture now. The deep meaning comes from inside, from what goes on in the building.”
The architect, who will be spending every other week in Calgary for the next three or four years, has ties to Calgary, where he has had friends for 40 years, and to Alberta. His maternal grandmother was from Tees, near Red Deer. He said he is looking forward to flyfishing here and to skiing in the winter.
When asked if it is possible to bring the project in on its $75 million budget for the building, Cloepfil said, “As possible as it is to bring any building in on budget.
“There is still a lot of work to do to wrangle the building’s scope into shape, since it has so many simultaneous aspirations. I think the design process will have a big impact on synthesizing things. It’s certainly an adequate budget and that’s not always the case either. People’s dreams are usually much bigger than what their development committee has told them they can raise. I think they’ve done a lot of good homework. They seem extremely well prepared.
“Pre-design and planning essentially will take us through the rest of the year,” he said, “to review everything and do our due diligence, compile information and get the team organized. Then I think we would ideally start on the design cycle on the first of the year.”
The building, which is still awaiting confirmation of its funding from three levels of government, is the first phase of a project that will eventually include a concert hall, expanded gallery spaces and retail space, and is considered the main cultural focal point of Calgary’s East Village development.
VIDEO:
http://www.calgaryherald.com/entertainment/King+Eddy+design+lead+East+Village+revitalization/2025661/story.html
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