With offices in Copenhagen and New York, BIG is a group of architects, designers, builders and thinkers operating within the fields of architecture, urbanism, research and development. BIG’s architecture emerges out of a careful analysis of how contemporary life constantly evolves and changes. TELUS Sky’s lead designer is BIG Founding Partner, Bjarke Ingels – named ‘Innovator of the Year’ for architecture by the Wall Street Journal in 2011.
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Our goal for TELUS Sky was to design an office building that would contribute to the Calgary core in a meaningful way. Calgary’s downtown is largely characterized by bland, corporate high rises. Against this background we set out to create something a little more feminine. A little finer grained.
The base and bottom floors of the building are clean and rectangular resulting in efficient open office layouts. As the building rises the floor plates slowly reduce in size and pixilate providing opportunities for offices with small balconies and terraces and ultimately results in smaller residential floor plates with balconies. An LED public art lighting installation illuminates the tower at night.
The best of two building types – the building is designed to seamlessly accommodate the transformation from working to living as the tower takes off from the ground to reach the sky.
The silhouette expresses the unification of the two uses in a single gesture – with rational straight lines composed to form a feminine figure. The result is both functional and incredibly expressive.
Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG)
DIALOG
DIALOG is a fully integrated architectural, engineering, interior design, urban design and planning firm with offices in Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver and Toronto. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to design, DIALOG embraces complex challenges such as healing patients with fewer staff; improving passenger experiences while reducing airport carbon footprints; and revitalizing abandoned urban neighbourhoods.
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