Shortly after Brad Cloepfil, the principal at Allied Works Architecture, began working on designs for a new National Music Centre in Canada, he asked his clients an unusual question.
"Do you really need a building?" he said.
"With iPods and digital downloads and traveling festivals, there are so many ways to teach and share music," he added by phone Wednesday.
But the goals for this new Canadian music hub -- final designs for which were released Thursday -- have always been more audacious than file sharing. The new facility will be one part performance hall and one part museum, with recording studios and a library and a host of other spaces thrown in for good measure. And the 135,000-square-foot space is not only charged with reviving Calgary's music scene, but also with leading the revitalization of the city's neglected East Village neighborhood.
"So, to do all that," Cloepfil added, "you do need a building, and you need the building itself to be an instrument, a generator of music and life."
What's most interesting about the NMC, though, is that the new spaces will be built around and within a 1905 hotel that for decades was itself the heart of Calgary's blues scene. Andrew Mosker, the centre's president, told The Huffington Post that his team wants to "shape really the entire new building -- its program, its design, its spirit" around the old King Edward Hotel.
That dream separates this plan from the countless new and planned buildings around the world that incorporate existing facilities into their design, but rarely try to do more than just preserve the physical space.
The hotel, closed since 2004, will be gutted and transformed into a central part of the new building, which will try to preserve Canada's music history at the same time as it advances its current musical talents. A two-story bridge spans over the old hotel, connecting two, new five-story wings and reframing the primary entrance to Calgary's East Village.
The major spaces are illuminated through the building's facade, connecting the inside to the outside and making the building's interior organization explicit. The architects hope the visibility will help the area gain an identity as Calgary's arts centre and help revitalize the "other side of the tracks" location, as Mosker put it.
That's a lot to ask of a building, of course, but little about the NMC is conventional. Once opened, the centre will operate a diverse program that should keep even its staff guessing. Artists in residence, administrative offices and a nightclub will operate out of the restored hotel; galleries and recording studios, as well as classrooms and the major performance space, will fill much of the new space. And the galleries, which will hold a growing Canadian music collection and part of the Canadian Music Hall of Fame, can double as additional performance halls.
"This centre combines the best ideas from the museum and performing arts worlds and adds an incubation element that's living and thriving and always circulating creativity," Mosker said. "I have not seen anything like this in the world and I've looked for over a decade."
Other architects who initially competed for the project had suggested tearing down the hotel, and starting completely anew, but Cloepfil sees its shell as a critical gesture in honoring the tradition of music in Calgary.
"The Eddy is really the first piece of the collection," he said. "The building holds it, envelops it, honors it." That's exactly what the team behind the project wanted -- not to build a new center for Calgary's music scene, but to rebuild an old one.
Still, there are challenges facing the NMC. Construction is supposed to start at the end if this year or the beginning of the next, and, if all goes well, will be finished in 2014. So far only $6 million Canadian dollars of private money has been raised to supplement the $75 million in government funding allocated to the $132.5 million project.
But the building is also among Calgary's first major cultural endeavors and, Mosker said, "one of the first times that this city has embraced design and chosen to do something unconventional. We have to finish what we've started."
Click through the images below to see just-released renderings of the facility: