Media Nexus
Riewe worked with a team that formulated the concept for a building of at least 100,000 square metres with mixed programmatic requirements. It was decided that the structure would house a media museum, a film library, a cinema, a live production theatre, laboratories, parking and circulation. These elements would be linked with existing transportation systems within the city to create a vehicle for media dissemination and discourse. As Calgary has the distinctive quality of being designed around automobile access, the team felt that the project should attempt to explore this condition through the integration of automobile access with other transportation networks in the downtown, including bus routes, +15 walkways, LRT stations, and sidewalks. The resulting spaces could establish a simultaneity between many diverse conditions of circulation.
The project was handed over to a new design team. In collaboration with Riewe, they interpreted these ideas with the goal of creating spaces with flexible applications; spaces that evoke strong potentials for occupation without prescribing function. Focal to the design were spaces that could be claimed for research, media access, congregation, entertainment, and movement at different points in time. A parkade existing on the site stimulated powerful ideas on how the free movement of pedestrians and motorists could be facilitated through an architectural idiom. The design team wanted to create spaces where cars and pedestrians could inhabit the same space, sometimes connecting, sometimes overlapping, and sometimes moving free of one another. The activity and information contained within the building were to be made available from multiple perspectives: the streetfront, the cubicles of neighbouring office towers, and so on.
The resulting structure appears to hover above street level, creating a space underneath the structure that is completely open to both pedestrian and vehicular access. Thus, affording the possibility of impromptu gatherings. From the exterior, structure is fissured with voids that permit viewers to glimpse the interior. The structure‘s solidity and hard-edged borders are undermined by the numerous appendages that extend into the surrounding urban fabric at multiple levels. Vehicles move up through the levels on ramps that fold back upon themselves. Catwalks for pedestrians are woven through a network of ramps, providing links to the office towers. The progression of cars and pedestrians along the ramps and walkways is punctuated by movement alongside large multimedia screens that stretch vertically through the interior, perforating the interior levels. Throughout the building there are facilities that can be accessed either as a motorist or pedestrian.
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