Architect Brad Cloepfil sees the national music center in Calgary, Alberta, as an ensemble piece: The center’s collections and exhibitions will provide the notes and the building will provide the rest.

In a musical sense, the term “rest” refers to a pause, a break between notes. Cloepfil, a principal with Allied Works Architecture in Portland, is bringing the calm of the Alberta prairie to his design for a buzzing building in a busy city.

“We started with the prairies and the monumental forms of the landscape,” Cloepfil said. “There’s an inherent power to the silence of the place.”

The nonprofit Cantos Music Foundation in an international competition last month chose Allied Works, with local partner firm BKDI Architects, to design the center. The 80,000-square-foot building will hold a research center, a museum, an instrument collection, a recording studio and a radio station, and will host live music and creative programs.

Allied Works began pre-design Oct. 1. The center is scheduled to open in 2013.

In announcing Allied Works’ selection, Cantos executive director Andrew Mosker said “Brad and his team will give us an innovative building that fits with Calgary, Alberta, the West and is symbolic of something that is truly uniquely Canadian.”

For a Portland native such as Cloepfil, that’s a testament to the research involved in the project. “At Allied Works, we really do our homework and try to understand the soul of the place,” Cloepfil said. “I’m not interested in plopping down a building in a city I don’t have a connection to.”

When Cloepfil visited Calgary 35 years ago, he was struck by how much of an urban island the city is. That hasn’t changed.

“It’s still very wild,” he said. “You go 30 miles outside of the city and it’s totally wild.”

Cloepfil sought to bring both the peace and monumental scale of the Alberta wild to his project. It’s there in the gaps between towers and the canyon-like main building interior. “There’s a significant in-between space,” he said. “That’s what that’s about.”

The music center itself will sit between worlds, marking the entrance to the gritty East Village neighborhood from the famous Calgary Stampede Grounds. The center will bridge the street to extend a wing around the King Edward Hotel, a legendary former blues venue.

Keeping the King Eddy, as it’s known, was important from a historical standpoint more than an architectural one, Cloepfil said. “Calgary is a city that has torn down the majority of its historic fabric,” he said, “especially in the East Village, where 90 percent has been demolished.

“Like in the Pacific Northwest, where we need to preserve every old growth tree because we have so few of them, they have to preserve every old building.”

City leaders have looked to the music center as the face of a neighborhood revitalization. Cantos officials saw what Cloepfil did in another run-down neighborhood with the Wieden+Kennedy building, a warehouse converted in 2000 to become the ad agency’s headquarters.

“The Wieden+Kennedy building (was) a new building inside an old building, and a catalyst for the neighborhood,” Cloepfil said. “It was long before the Brewery Blocks. The Pearl was just becoming the Pearl.
“And I think they see the national music center doing the same thing to the East Village.”

While Cloepfil has won major projects across the continent, including New York, Denver and Ann Arbor, Mich., he hasn’t had another in Portland since the Wieden+Kennedy headquarters. Regardless, he loves to work in Portland.

“It’s where I’m from (and) it’s where my family is,” he said. “I love the light, the smell, the air.

“And who knows, someday I might even get to do another building here.”

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Portland-based Allied Works Architecture beat out four major international firms to design Canada’s national music center in Calgary, Alberta. The 80,000-square-foot building will hold a research center, a museum, an instrument collection, a recording studio and a radio station. The center also will be used to host live music and creative programs.

The nonprofit Cantos Music Foundation last week announced that Allied Works, with local partner firm BKDI Architects, will design the center. Incorporating the renowned – and now shuttered – blues hotspot, the King Edward Hotel, the center will anchor an urban renewal push in the city’s East Village district.

The Calgary Municipal Land Corporation, the development arm of city government, had big enough hopes for the center to pay each of the five finalists $50,000 in U.S. currency. The other four proposals were submitted by Studio Pali Fekete Architects of Los Angeles, Diller Scofidio + Renfro of New York, Jean Nouvel Workshop of Paris, and Saucier + Perrotte of Montreal, Quebec.

A panel of architects, musicians, museum experts and business representatives judged the entries.

Allied Works, founded by architect Brad Cloepfil, has designed the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis, and the University of Michigan Museum of Art.

The new music center will provide a link between the Calgary Stampede grounds to the East Village, said Peter Burgener, senior partner of BKDI Architects. “A gateway component is part of what the design is about,” Burgener said.

“As soon as you come into the area, that’s what you see,” he said. “It’s a celebration of that arrival.”

Andrew Mosker, Cantos Music Foundation’s executive director, in a statement called the design “symbolic of something that is truly uniquely Canadian.”

“Brad and his team will give us an innovative building that fits with Calgary, Alberta, (and) the West,” Mosker said in the statement.

Burgener gave credit for the proposal’s Canadian bona fides to the American lead partner. Cloepfil and his team listened to BKDI’s input and studied the site’s surroundings extensively.

The music planned for the Cantos center also informed the design of the building, which mimics the form of a musical instrument, Burgener said. “It’s a collection of vertical vessels,” he said.

“Like if you hit a tuning fork, it gives a particular sound; each vessel gives a special unique flavor and emotive response.”

The post Portland firm’s music center plan pitch perfect appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

Architect Brad Cloepfil has a new project to add to the portfolio of his firm Allied Works Architecture: a music center in Calgary, Alberta.

The Portland architect’s firm beat out four other firms to win the rights to design an 80,000-square-foot venue for Cantos Music Foundation. The nonprofit organization said the Cantos National Music Centre will offer room for music-related programs and exhibits such as a museum of vintage instruments, a music research lab and recording studios.

The music center will be located in Calgary’s East Village at the historic King Edward Hotel, which locals refer to as the King Eddy. Allied Works’ partner in the project will be Calgary-based .

In July, Allied Works, Jean Nouvel Workshop, Studio Pali Fekete Architects, Diller Scofidio and Renfro, and Saucier + Perrotte were invited to participate in a competition to design the music center. The resulting submissions were judged by a committee made up of musicians, architects, museum experts and representatives from the business community.

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Brad Cloepfil is hoping to strike the right note with his for a new music center in Calgary.

The Portland architect’s proposed design for the National Music Centre at the (which locals apparently call the King Eddy) is supposed to represent “a series of resonant vessels or instruments,” Nancy Tousley writes in a story for the Calgary Herald.

Cloepfil’s quoted in the story as saying he considers the building to be an instrument. He even created details that are supposed to call to mind carrying cases for instruments.

The concept makes perfect sense when you consider that the music center will house a collection of rare instruments. Still, for some reason, the rending of the building makes me think of a Roman coliseum. All that’s missing is a gladiator or two, and an emperor giving the design a thumbs up … or a thumbs down.

The post Brad Cloepfil + Calgary = sweet music? appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

Brad Cloepfil is hoping to strike the right note with his for a new music center in Calgary.

The Portland architect’s proposed design for the National Music Centre at the (which locals apparently call the King Eddy) is supposed to represent “a series of resonant vessels or instruments,” Nancy Tousley writes in a story for the Calgary Herald.

Cloepfil’s quoted in the story as saying he considers the building to be an instrument. He even created details that are supposed to call to mind carrying cases for instruments.

The concept makes perfect sense when you consider that the music center will house a collection of rare instruments. Still, for some reason, the rending of the building makes me think of a Roman coliseum. All that’s missing is a gladiator or two, and an emperor giving the design a thumbs up … or a thumbs down.

The post Brad Cloepfil + Calgary = sweet music? appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.