2025: A bad year for modern heritage
The year 2025 was a bad one for modern heritage in Calgary. By my count, no less than five buildings and two houses featured on this site were demolished. It's possible there are even more, but here are the losses I've identified:
Additionally, between 2022 and 2024, the last two remaining Jack Long houses for Hashman Construction in Bel-Aire were demolished. Other recent losses include the Thomas W. Osborn House (2022) and Jack M. Moon House (2022). And the Sam Katchen House was butchered beyond recognition (2022).
While I love the City of Calgary, it's disregard for heritage never ceases to enrage me. A casual look through the inventories on this website shows just how little of the city's mid-century heritage survives.
The mid-century was the era that made Calgary what it is: a modern metropolitan centre built on the petroleum industry. Physical evidence of the city's formative era will be all but lost to future generations.
Objects in the physical world create our sense of place; this applies equally in the natural and built worlds. In the same way the topography, flora, and climate of a natural environment engender a sense of locational specificity, the buildings and landmarks of a city have this effect in an urban environment. For example, the foothills of Alberta conjure an equally immediate sense of locatedness as Big Ben does in London.
Unlike the natural environment, which is mostly unchanging, the built environment requires time to form a sense of place in our imaginations. The longer a building or other city feature stands, the more it contributes to our feeling of being grounded in a particular place. Consequently, the more fleeting our built environment, the less grounded we feel. The impermanence of Calgary's built landscape has created a city that feels placeless. Buildings scarcely have enough time to affix themselves to our daily lives before they disappear. While this website deals with more prestige architecture, the phenomenon of impermanence is even more pronounced in genereic architecture, with entire neighbourhoods in the inner city being demolished and rebuilt. Overall, Calgary feels like an alien place to anyone who has lived there for more than a generation.
Why should we care? I believe that people long for permanence and solidity, and that our rootedness in a place go a long way in giving us this feeling. While I don't have a fancy study to prove it, it stands to reason that the endless churn of development and redevelopment add to a feeling of anxiety and uncertainty. Additionally, the throwaway nature of our buildings add to a feeling of meaninglessness. What merit does a work of architecture hold if it's likely to be torn down in a few decades?
While more heritage designations would be good, those alone wouldn't be a remedy for Calgary's destructive and ephemeral culture.