Zoltan Pali

They packed the Grand Theatre last night in Calgary for the public unveiling of the five proposals on the short list for the Cantos Music Foundation’s King Edward Hotel renaissance project. (Background is available in my earlier blog post here.) Finally the scale and the entirely salutary eccentricity of Cantos’s ambition is clear: they want to build a National Music Centre worthy of the name — in, over and around the skeleton of a tattered old blues dive in the heart of one of the country’s sketchiest neighbourhoods. But transformation is at the heart of this project. The East Village redevelopment will be one of the country’s most ambitious urban-design projects over the next few years. The Cantos National Music Centre is a keystone for the East Village project. And now Cantos has lured a handful of the world’s most audacious architects into a public battle for the right to kick off that transformation.