A Sneak Peek of the Bow Building

You can see it from pretty much wherever you stand in Calgary these days. Thousands upon thousands of people drive, walk and ride by the Bow building project daily in our Centre City. We get to watch the progress of the exterior of the Bow, but what happens on the inside has remained pretty much a mystery unless you're one of the estimated 10-thousand employees working on this icon-in-the-making.  

Well, some of the Centre City team had a rare and wonderful opportunity to take a tour of the Bow building. Led by Michael Brown, associate vice-president with developer Matthews Southwest, the group was treated to spectacular views, updates and stories of how this impressive 58 floor building is all coming together.

Exterior shot of The Bow.

Pamela Mierau, coordinator with Centre City Planning, Development & Implementation, shared some of the spectacular shots of the interior of The Bow, along with her own perspective of this breathtaking tour. 

Shapely walls: every wall is curved in this building.

We asked Mierau what surprised her during this tour and she said, "The thing that's really cool is that the floorplate doesn't touch the wall edges so you feel like you're kind of floating - there are these floating garden spaces that go up really high and these are meant to be kind of like open air meeting spaces, so that was neat, just how big they were."

And of The Bow's trademark curvy walls, Mierau explained, "There are no straight walls there. They're all curved. They have to cut every single floor panel on site because they're all different." That's intensive work!  
 

The Bow building project started in 2007 and is located on two blocks of Centre Street and 5th and 6th Avenues S.E.

A neat surprise, Mierau said, was that there is virtually a whole other city in the basement of The Bow. It's where workers meet, eat and take their breaks. She said she really wasn't expecting that whole other underground kind of culture but she acknowledges it just makes sense since there are so many people working 24 hours a day, seven days a week to get this project done. 

 

"This building has a defining, iconic, dominating presence in our Centre City," said Mierau. It's a structure that has changed the entire picture of downtown: "It's quite lovely for us. While we often get  boxes, this one, there are no straight walls, it's innovative and is such a dominant feature in our skyline. There's also a public art component in the Bow as well and we're really excited about that."

Thanks to Mierau  and her group for sharing these photos and letting us tour the Bow building vicariously! And thanks to the Matthews Southwest team as well for the opportunity they provided. We'll be watching the progress and we'll post updates whenever we can. 

 

Comments

[bryguy76]

As I sit at my desk watching the Bow go up every day, I often wonder what it looked like inside! Thanks!