The University of Calgary is expanding its downtown Calgary footprint, with the move of one of its current downtown faculties to a larger space in the core, with an eye on creating a new design district.

The new plan will convert 180,000 square feet of office space at 801 7 Avenue SW into space for more than 1,300 students and faculty in the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape. 

The space is across the street from UCalgary’s existing downtown campus. When it opens in 2026, the space will include design studios, classrooms, research spaces, a robotic fabrication workshop, an exhibition gallery, and a community-facing design justice lab. 

The project is supported by up to $9 million in funding from The City of Calgary’s Downtown Post-Secondary Institution Incentive Program. 

The move will free up more than 800 spaces on the main UCalgary campus, said Dr. Ed McCauley, President and Vice-Chancellor at the University of Calgary. These are main campus spaces that are in high demand, he said.

McCauley said that through the city’s LRT Red Line, students and faculty will remain easily connected to the main UCalgary campus. 

“Thank you to Mayor Gondek for the money,” said Dr. John Brown, Dean of the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape. 

The announcement is the culmination of seven years of lobbying and hard work, according to Brown.  

This is an opportunity for students and staff to impact the community through money, time and energy, as much as it is an expansion of the school, Brown said.  

“We’re going to be out on the streets. We’re going to create a design district that people are going to want to come to in the same way that people want to come to the East Village because of the quality of that environment,” he said. 

Brown emphasized that just as a medical school needs to be in a hospital, a design school needs to be downtown. 

“it just makes perfect sense that we should be here, not just located here, but actually embedded in this school, in the same way that you can’t really tell when you’re in the hospital whether you have somebody from medical school helping you, or someone within the medical profession,” Brown said.  

“We’re looking forward to transforming the way we think about 21st-Century design education.” 

School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape is the smallest UCalgary school, but they “punch above our weight,” according to Brown. 

Brown said that current students have been using the old Central Library for the last five years, a space with no heat and “intermittent Wi-FI.” 

“I appreciate you (students) keeping the dream and not having a coup,” Brown quipped. 

Downtown moved backed by Calgary mayor

Calgary Mayor Jyoti Gondek is “over the moon” for the move. 

“Just imagine projects that they’re going to come up with, the experiences they will have as design professionals,” she said.  

“Ten or 15 years from now, we’re going to look back and say, I am so glad we invested in having education downtown that treated our city like a living lab.” 

Gondek noted the similarities between this move and her previous experience with the university, when she spearheaded the move of the Westman Center for Real Estate studies at the Haskayne School of Business to the UCalgary downtown campus.  

“From 2015 to 2017, we established a presence in that building, and students didn’t just study real estate, they actually experienced it in their classroom projects,” she said.  

“It mattered because it was a living lab, and it showed me how transformative that place-based education can be.” 

Gondek said that the city will continue working with other post-secondary partners to bring more learning opportunities to its core.  

“This expansion will bring vibrancy, more people downtown, more often, and it brings economic opportunity with new reasons for neighboring businesses to continue to grow and evolve alongside a more residential and academic audience,” she said.