Originally constructed as a celebration space for the 1988 Winer Olympics, Olympic Plaza is undergoing a transformation to become the landing and gateway for a new cultural complex. The project design re-imagines the spatial arrangement of the site to create a civic landmark that is welcoming, inclusive and accessible to all, flexible in its activation, and meaningful to Calgarians in its design narrative.
The space is designed as a thoughtful and adaptable public space conceived to operate at multiple scales – as a ‘town square’ for an evolving downtown neighbourhood, as a great civic asset at the heart of the city and as a world-class destination in the realm of culture and art. The site will be a magnet for civic and cultural daily life year-round, and will enable all scales of programming, festivals and events as a new performance venue in the Arts Commons campus. More than a courtyard or front landing, it is a space designed to become a destination not only for performances on special days, but also as a stage for the theatre of the everyday.
The iconography of the 1988 Winter Olympics becomes a starting point for form and spatial arrangement of the redesigned plaza. The snowflake of the 1988 Olympic logo inspires a radiating ‘sunflake’ with concentric rows of stone paving that create directionality and emphasis of movement towards the centre of the plaza. It becomes a centre point for the layout and character of the entire space, structuring the active edges of terraces, lounge spaces and the Pavilion while unifying the Plaza across 8th Avenue to the existing Arts Commons facility. A central water feature reinforces the Olympic memory anchoring the plaza centre with an animated water basin in warm months and an ice rink during the winter.
On the east side of the plaza is the Pavilion, a park structure that reinforces pedestrian scale and activates the east edge of the plaza. Its structure and form take their cue from the star-shaped paving pattern, accentuating the radial lines of the “sunflake”. This is legible on the interior floor and in the peaks of the roof that lift like stage curtains, creating a view corridor from the heart of the Plaza through the Pavilion and beyond to Historic City Hall and Municipal Plaza.
The transformed Olympic Plaza aspires to embody Calgary’s evolving civic values to become a revitalized landmark that anchors this space as an iconic crossroads and destination in the city.
