Wonderland - Iconic Placemaking
What began as a placemaking feature for the Bow Tower is now an icon for the entire city, serving as a tourist attraction and local favourite. The Bow is a 58-story tower lavishly expanding across two city blocks in downtown Calgary. This eye-catching building broke the record for being the tallest tower in the city, forever altering its skyline.
Encana and Cenovus, leading North American energy producers, wanted an equally iconic public artwork to match the building’s prominent presence in the city.
“The overall quality of [Jaume Plensa’s] work. The sort of lightness and transparency of it, those attributes at some of the other installations, made us realize that it would be good for The Bow because its fairly light and transparent itself”
Working closely with Jaume Plensa and his team, Heavy worked to develop the details and structural requirement to achieve his dramatic vision. This project was challenging from a technical perspective due to its large scale and the high standard of precision required for the final piece.
Particular attention was paid to the bar-to-bar overlap connections to ensure they matched Plensa’s intent – each connection was fully welded out, ground, and finished to an exacting standard. Along with the welding attention to detail, the Heavy team came up with an innovative way to use milled foam templates to define the curvature of the steel bars to ensure the features of the model would be accurate.
Similarly, the installation plan took the scale and timeline into account. The head was shipped to site in pieces that were then welded together onsite using a significant internal frame to hold everything together during final assembly. The internal frame was then cut apart and removed through the sculpture doorways. To prevent corrosion, we then painted the sculpture using a high quality industrial coating system that can be refreshed as needed.
Results + Impact:
The Wonderland sculpture continues to be an icon for Calgary’s downtown, serving as a welcoming placemaking feature for tourists and locals alike. Its open doorways encourage interaction as people enjoy viewing the city from a new perspective, wondering at its light and airy feel.
Following the success of the Wonderland sculpture, we continued to collaborate with the artist Jaume Plensa on another piece at the Fairmont Century Plaza in LA, titled “Laura”.