EnCana preserves part of York Hotel friezes for future use in The Bow

Behind the York Hotel’s bland brick exterior, the old Calgary hotel boasts friezes that are nearly unique in North America. At least two exterior walls that bear the bas-relief friezes will evade demolition and rise again in EnCana’s The Bow.

Preservation

Calgary

When EnCana Corp. went shopping for designers for The Bow, its new headquarters likely to become a Calgary icon, officials visited the Commerce Bank in Frankfurt.

The tallest building in Europe, it was designed by Foster and Partners of London and Berlin to incorporate a series of historic buildings into its base.

Not too surprising in the Old World. But who knew there was anything in the new west’s York Hotel that was worth saving.

Opened in 1930 in the very heart of downtown, the eight-storey York was once a landmark on the Calgary skyline, a competitor to the Palliser Hotel. While the Palliser remains luxury accommodation, the York ended its hotel life in 1992 becoming City of Calgary housing for the less fortunate.

But behind the York’s bland brick exterior lies a story ferreted out by architect David Jefferies, principal with Zeidler Partnership Architects of Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver, project architects working with signature architects Foster & Partners on The Bow.

Jefferies has become accustomed to the incredulous response when people learn of his task to preserve two exterior walls of the building.

In fact, the York boasted friezes that are nearly unique in North America, decorative poured-in-place panels of a kind briefly fashionable when concrete was a new and exciting material.

“Concrete was regarded as the new stone then,” says Jefferies, particularly in California because of the 1906 earthquake. The use of surface decorative concrete and experimentation with reinforced concrete, precast block and stone imitation was common before the 1930s and the advent of the durability of precast concrete.

But, outside of the York, Jefferies has found only two existing buildings, one in Hollywood, the other in Denver, that used the same cast-in-concrete friezes.

Jacob Knoepfli, an Ontario carpenter who came west and took up real estate developing, designed the York with assistance from Merrill Owens, a graphic artist employed by Hollywood Studios Inc.

Jefferies reckons he used his set designer skills on the York, creating friezes of plant fronds in a style encompassing the art deco movement of the day and the film industry’s then-infatuation with Egyptian, Moroccan, oasis themes. “Owens only knew one industry,” says Jefferies seeing the influence of a movie set around the top and bottom of the York.

The graphics for the bas-relief friezes were created on four separate concrete forms that were fully or partially repeated around the top and lower sections of the building.

False joints were placed in the surface to create the illusion the work had been created from carved stone and they were painted to reinforce the carved appearance.

Getting the friezes off the building safely is the current job of Toronto’s Clifford Masonry. Jefferies says the first strategy – to hold the façade in place while building around it – was abandoned when “we discovered we could crush the lime mortar with our hands. We decided we couldn’t safely support it so the only effective way to save it was to take it down and rebuild it”.

Clifford and Ledcor Construction staff accomplished that in early August. By then, crews were about three quarters through taking down the brown brick originally supplied by Clayburn Brick from its Abbotsford plant. Between 70 and 80 per cent of the bricks can be saved and used to reconstruct two of the hotel’s exterior walls which will be incorporated into The Bow.

The York Hotel has to be gone by the end of the year to meet a commitment to reopen 6th Avenue by next summer.

But after a slumber under cover, probably in the Ledcor yard, the York – at least two walls of it bearing the bas-relief friezes – will rise again in The Bow.