Calgary: Interchanges as art?

A few weeks ago, I became intrigued with a tweet by @roadknots with its attached Google Earth photo collage of some of the world’s most complex and convoluted interchange. Upon opening the photo I was startled by the images and puzzled by the term “road knots,” never before having encountered the term.

**This is the collage of international Road Knots created by Nicholas Rougeux for google maps.**

Note: After posting this blog received a tweet from Nicholas Rougeux saying, " Road Knots is a silly name i came up with for complex and beautiful interchanges. Glad you like them." It will be interesting to see if this catches on.

**This is a collage of some of Calgary's road knots created by Peak Aerials. Note: one of them is not a road. Can you tell which one?**

A quick Google search didn’t help – it seems this a new term. However, it is appropriate given many of the interchanges have elements of some of the knots I learned as a Boy Scout many, many years ago – the Bowline, the Sheepshank and the trusty old Clove Hitch.

Never wanting Calgary to be left out of any new urban design discussion, I started surfing Google Earth to see how our interchanges compared. I quickly found some interesting Calgary road knots.

Then I contacted Keith Walker at Peak Aerials who I knew has a collection of aerial photos (mostly from Calgary, Toronto, Vancouver, Edmonton and Fort McMurray) to see if he might have documented some of Calgary’s incredible, implausible, inconceivable and improbable interchanges.

Sure enough, in his 250,000+ collection of aerial images he had many photos of Calgary’s road knots.

Calgary's interchanges take on a whole new context from the air with their sensual twists and turns. Some looked like cartoon figures,others like abstract drawings or petroglyphs. It was also intriguing to see how they changed with the seasons.

Below are the ten Calgary road knots I found the most interesting. I have chosen not to identify their location so you can appreciate them for their aesthetic qualities first and place second. Hopefully they will engage your imagination as they did mine. Send me your favourite road knots or share some of your thoughts on these or other road knots. Did I save the best for the end?

Figuring out which knots they most closely resemble I will leave up to you.