Kyle Auch of DIALOG presented the reimagining of Calgary’s Glenbow, now the J.R. Shaw Centre for Arts and Culture, as radical sustainability: reusing a closed 1975 concrete ‘bunker’ rather than demolishing it, and giving it a new, more public identity. Reuse alone, he argued, avoids tens of thousands of tonnes of carbon and concrete while sharply cutting the museum’s energy and emissions; and a wholly new envelope, an undulating, hand-sprayed glass-fibre-reinforced-concrete skin the team pursued under the single word ‘fuzzy’, opens the vault to light and the city while holding the tight climate a collection of 260,000 works demands.
Kyle Auch introduced the reimagining of Calgary’s Glenbow, now the J.R. Shaw Centre for Arts and Culture, as a project his practice, DIALOG, approached through questions rather than answers, and as a piece of what he called radical sustainability: reusing and transforming an existing building rather than replacing it.
The building they inherited made that ambition hard. Designed in 1975 by Albert Dale and Associates, the original Glenbow was, in Auch’s description, a failed attempt at brutalism, where that movement prized the lightness of concrete against the city, this one slammed itself into the ground and became a vault, built to hold 260,000 works including Indigenous belongings. It had no front door, and turned its back on the city and its people.
Three options had been considered, among them demolishing and rebuilding, complicated because the basement belongs not to Glenbow but to the neighbouring Calgary Telus Convention Centre, and moving the collection and selling the site. DIALOG instead put sustainability first and reused the structure, which Auch said avoided some 56,000 tonnes of new carbon and kept 38,000 tonnes of concrete out of landfill; with a wholly new envelope and services, the museum should cut its annual emissions by 41 per cent and its energy use by 38 per cent.
Six principles framed the work, the museum should be radically accessible, bring its back of house to the centre, earn its own revenue, offer many vantage points on the art, provoke the city and be a new way to build. Where the old building opened only its lower floors to the public, the new one opens all eight; Auch likened the original stack of slabs to a pancake and the result to a waffle, which the cast-in-place structure had always been. Opening the vault to light meant surgery: taking a cue from Gordon Matta-Clark’s Conical Intersect and Sol LeWitt’s grids, the team removed the north-east corner entirely to untie the building’s ‘Gordian knot’ and stitched it back with new steel, all while the convention centre below kept hosting events.
The new skin began with a single word: fuzzy. Working with the fabricators Heavy and Ferguson, and illustrating the idea through Ai Weiwei’s layered sculptures, the team pursued a façade that blurs the line between line and form, surface and edge, an investigation of some 200 to 250 3D-printed swatches, from geometric to organic, before settling on a final design in white.
The material is Cloudcrete, a glass-fibre-reinforced concrete hand-sprayed panel by panel; four panel types run from flat to around forty centimetres deep, so the surface catches light and shadow as the sun moves around the building. Where the façade had to be fifty per cent open for mechanical reasons, perforated metal stands in, matched as closely as possible to the concrete’s finish and colour, and where the old pre-cast panels came down at five or six a day, the new ones went up at fifty or sixty.
Beneath the sculpture, the envelope does real work: the team found barely an inch of delaminated insulation behind the old wall and rebuilt it to six or eight, getting close to the tightly controlled climate a collection needs despite Calgary’s swings in temperature and humidity. The moves read across the building, a sealed 10,000-square-foot patio becomes public space, a ‘pillow window’ pushes into a new gallery, and the hard-won north-east corner now carries a rentable boardroom with a view of the city that never existed before. Nothing is covered up; columns and floors are left exposed, telling the story of the change from 1975 to 2026. What was a bunker, Auch suggested, is becoming a postcard for Calgary.
