Calgary, and "wild west" mentality

I moved to Calgary two years ago now, to my own surprise and even that of my close friends and family.

I work as an architect and have experience working / living in Copenhagen Amsterdam and Rotterdam. I wanted to draw a slight comparison between the business mentality of the Dutch and Albertans, and discuss the built environment of both Calgary and Rotterdam where I feel there are many contrasts. Rotterdam is the modern "business center" of the Netherlands.

In Calgary you hear a lot - and I can definitely feel, a real "go get it" attitude to most endeavors. This is why it has been hailed as the business capital of the country. And I really do get that sense - an ease in the ability to get involved in things one is genuinely interested in - to begin working on them with others at a certain scale. However, this sentiment doesn't seem to be reflected in our built environment and I would suspect it might have to do with the complex nature of how a building comes into reality. Or maybe a limit to what and how Albertan's approach experimentation at this scale with many others involved.

In the Netherlands for instance there is an intrinsic understanding of the importance of design as a necessity. That is, if they didn't engineer solutions to hold back the sea, and to design around their own unique conditions there would literally be no place to inhabit! Here it would appear design is understood generally as a luxury rather then a societal tool. You can't design a shed without an architect in the Netherlands, whereas in Alberta many single family homes that form a large part of our built environment do not require the opinion of an architectural designer.

The Dutch come off as highly conservative people, but at the exact same time are afraid to be viewed this way. There is a real sense of experimentation in the way they design and build their environments.

What do you think is the big challenge in applying the "go get it" attitude of the "wild west" to our built environment here, whether that be in architecture at the building scale or in Urban Planning at the city scale?

Great design resource

100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People (Voices That Matter) Submitted July 26, 2016 at 08:43PM by philwilson2659 http://ift.tt/2av0c69