Garages are an essential part of most Calgarians everyday lives. Many Calgarians love to brag that in the winter even when it is -30 outside that they don’t need to wear a coat as they go from their heated garage at home, to their heated garage at work.

Parking garages are also part of Calgarians everyday experience at grocery stores, shopping malls, hardware stores, as well post-secondary schools and hospitals.

Suburban Calgarians love their attached front garage where they can just press a button and the garage door magically opens to allow them access to their personal “bat cave.” No need to chat with the pesky neighbour who might be outside. Calgary’s suburban streetscape is dominated by blank front garage door that is often almost the same square footage as front lawn and hides the front door, creating a homogenous blank lifeless streetscape.

Inner-city neighbourhoods have back alleys so the garages are hidden with access via a gravel trail that is dirty and dusty in the summer and so rutted in the winter you need a 4-wheel drive vehicle to get in and out as you dodge all the recycling bins scattered like a giant slalom ski course.

Fun Quip: Heaven forbids you should meet someone coming from the other direction – “No YOU back-up!”

Even in the City Centre, most people won’t buy or rent unless there is room for their car in the parking garage, even better if there are two spots.

Calgary’s downtown is dominated by huge underground office parkades (most cities call them parking garages). Every office tower constructed in the past 40 years, is built above several floors of underground parking. The Bow Tower parkade is so big it extends under the street to the next block and has room for 1,400 cars and 320 bikes. In a few cases underground parkades have parks and public plazas on top of them – Harmony Park and Harley Hotchkiss Gardens being two of the most prominent.

Fun Quip: You could say, Calgary puts the “park” in PARKing Garage.

Below the old York Hotel site plaza is the Bow Tower parkade that takes up two city blocks. Yes that is a Jaume Plensa sculpture in the background.

The handsome above-ground brick façade Centennial Parkade completed in 2010 to celebrate the City’s Centennial, (not to be confused with Canada’s Centennial in 1967) built next to the Canadian Pacific Railway tracks looks like a huge early 20th century warehouse building. Rumour has it while it was under construction people thought it was a loft housing project and started inquiring about rents.

Centennial Parkade is home to home to 840 heated parking spots. It is also home to the 17 cow sculptures from the Udderly Art public art initiative in the year 2,000.

Calgary’s newest downtown and most expensive civic parkade is in East Village, the glitzy Platform Innovation Centre which cost $80M for 503 parking stalls and 50,000 square feet of office space or an absurd $140,000 per stall.

Fun Fact: It is perhaps the most expensive parking stalls in Canada.

The structure looks like a metallic cruise ship or perhaps some monster Xylophone escaped from the nearby National Music Centre. Not only is its undulating tubular shinny design a bit weird, but it has been designed so sometime in the future when the demand for parking downtown declines, it can be converted to other uses including residential. In reality, it will most likely get torn down before it gets redeveloped.

SAIT (Southern Alberta Institute of Technology) has a parkade with a sports field on top, and a huge mural (made from punched metal that reflects the sunlight to create a huge landscape artwork) that wraps around it on three side. The entrance/exit to the parkade from the campus level is a glass pyramid-like structure that somewhat resembles the Louvre Museum entrance in Paris.

At the Alberta Children’s Hospital, the parkade is right out of a LEGO kit, which is not surprising as children were consulted in the design of the parkade and hospital. Who doesn’t like kids architecture? Who knew a hospital could look happy?

Last Word

In Calgary “garages” are a huge part of our everyday life. They dominate the streetscape of suburbs, the alleyways of the inner city and the downtown pedestrian experience. So many residents int Calgary’s Sunnyside community have converted their garage doors into canvases for artworks that they have a back alley art walk.

Indeed, Calgary’s moniker could be “The City of Garages!”