National Music Centre of Canada

Allied Works Architecture (AWA) doesn’t enter open competitions often. The Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Dallas was a rare exception for the firm. Just as that school project was finishing up, AWA principal Brad Cloepfil found the brief—and site—for the National Music Centre of Canada (NMC) in Calgary, Alberta, too intriguing to pass up. Cloepfil had visited Calgary as a teenager, making a stop in the city’s infamous King Edward Hotel, which housed a seedy but much-loved blues bar. It is around that century-old landmark that Cloepfil’s spectacular new building for NMC, called Studio Bell, takes shape.

By the time the “King Eddy” closed in 2004, not much was left of its East Village neighborhood. The area was decimated, with blighted buildings and vacant lots. Cloepfil was faced with a challenge: “How do you hold the site when there’s nothing there?”

Instead of looking to the urban context, AWA drew inspiration from the unique Canadian Rockies landscape just outside Calgary, particularly its hoodoos, or rock formations. Cloepfil first learned about them from Clyfford Still’s paintings when he was designing the Denver museum dedicated to the artist’s work. Still had painted the hoodoos near his Bow Island home in southern Alberta in the late 1930s...

Read the full story here (Architectural Record, November 2016)