Project 03 of 17
Downtown Calgary
Cities & Places · Calgary, Alberta
Six takes above the Bow River.
The Bow River runs through the middle of Calgary, and most of what the city is known by sits on one short stretch of it: the Centre Street Bridge pointing straight at the Calgary Tower, Prince's Island Park, the crossings at Bridgeland.
Atom2Adam Studio flew six takes along that stretch — this is the studio's own city, the one it operates from — and staged nothing: the CTrain crosses on its timetable, the traffic is Calgary's, the light is the evening's. From the air the tower, the bridges, the island and the mountains behind them sit in one frame. The page climbs to it in four steps: the tower, the crossing, the island, the city.
- Subject
- Downtown Calgary along the Bow River — the Calgary Tower, the Centre Street and Reconciliation bridges, Memorial Drive, Prince's Island Park and the East Village from Bridgeland.
- Intent
- Show the studio's own city by the things Calgarians place themselves with: the river, the bridges and the tower.
- Seen
- Centre Street running straight at the Calgary Tower, the Reconciliation Bridge and the CTrain bridge side by side from directly above, the wetland at the east end of Prince's Island at dusk, the George C. King Bridge to St. Patrick's Island, and the Rockies on the horizon.
- Made
- Six aerial takes, seven films cut from them and seven frames. Nothing staged; nothing shot from the ground.
I
The tower
South over the Centre Street Bridge, straight at the tower.
Centre Street points at it. So does the camera.
The Calgary Tower at the end of Centre Street, The Bow beside it.
The Calgary Tower opened on 30 June 1968 as the Husky Tower and stands 190.8 metres at 101 9 Avenue SW. The dark crescent beside it is The Bow: 236 metres, finished in 2012 to a Foster + Partners design, and built 11 metres shorter than planned so its shadow would stop short of the river pathways. Centre Street runs at both of them from the north, over the bridge and through Chinatown — which is why the film starts above the river and lets the street do the framing.
The bridge deck, Chinatown at its south end, the tower straight ahead.
II
The crossing
The Reconciliation Bridge and the CTrain bridge, from directly above.
The truss span opened in 1910 as the Langevin Bridge; a second span went in beside it in 1972, and the whole crossing was renamed the Reconciliation Bridge in 2017. The CTrain's Blue Line crosses the Bow on its own bridge next to them and then runs down the middle of Memorial Drive — the road the city renamed from Sunnyside Boulevard and lined with trees for the Calgary soldiers who died in the First World War.
Cars on the 1972 span; the CTrain bridge curving beside it.
Memorial Drive: the track, the lanes, the pathway, the river.
The same four things, held still.
III
The island
East along the Bow from above Prince's Island, the Centre Street Bridge ahead.
Prince's Island is twenty hectares in the middle of the river, given to the city by the Prince family in 1947 and named for Peter Anthony Prince, founder of the Eau Claire Lumber Mill. The east end of the island is a made wetland, and three bridges tie it to Eau Claire. Downstream, the Centre Street Bridge has crossed the river since December 1916 under four concrete lions — cast by James L. Thomson after Landseer's at the foot of Nelson's Column, and replaced by replicas in 2001.
The wetland, the lagoon, the Eau Claire towers, the bridge downstream.
Down toward the ponds and the promenade at dusk.
The east end of the island, the lights of Eau Claire coming on.
IV
The city
From above Bridgeland: the East Village, the bridges, downtown, the Rockies.
The white arches are the George C. King Bridge — the skipping-stone bridge, opened in October 2014 — stepping from the East Village to St. Patrick's Island and on to Bridgeland. Past it the Reconciliation Bridge, past that the Centre Street Bridge, then the tower, and past everything the line of the Rockies. One frame holds the whole of it.
The earlier take: the truss, the tower and The Bow from above the river.
Everything the city is known by, in one frame.
Detail → Whole
Downtown Calgary ends. 17 projects in the collection.
