YELLOWKNIFE SKYLINE

JMB: There is a unique quality to the air in Yellowknife. Especially when the air on the edge of dawn, and a heartbeat to noon, as in this drawing in January, freezes with glee below the mercury.

The town sits in a dish on the edge of the lake with a slow barren hill as a sentinel. A skirt of jack pine and sparse aspen punctuate the horizon.

Some sense the city's harsh modernity in the landscape, like towers that spur through the rock.

Still, it is an object of beauty.

From Jackfish Lake, the city's skyline peeks above the crest of the lakeshore for a softened view of the modern architecture. It harmonizes in this instance as a backdrop to the bedrock and waterline. It is important to realize how modern images of the city can in fact play off the wilderness all around.

The glow of Auroras over the winter northern landscape brands the experience of life in Yellowknife.

Many travel from far and wide for this spectacle that is a gift to the residents. This most complete view from the end of the Strip, is only equaled in the summer when the waters of Frame Lake mirror the city's skyline.

This other view of the city's skyline is enjoyed from the downtown residential core. It outlines the major destinations to downtown - office buildings and shopping centers - as well as the pedestrian jaunt over bedrock that can get you there.

From Old Town, the view of the skyline is restricted to a narrow field of view. And the topography again limits this view of the skyline which can only be seen from the Old Float Plane base, where it sets against the marina and the bay in the foreground, with the east end of downtown and adjacent residential neighborhoods tumbling down to the water's edge.

In this skyline view the Northwestel Tower, Scotia Center and Bellanca Building are still visible behind the YK center and flanked with the Coast Fraser Tower.

In the view from Old Town the variable late winter sky accentuates underexposure of the skyline, which only ever gets lit by the early summer sun from the east. This skyline extends to the north with the Niven Lake residential subdivisions and the crest of the bedrock as it carries off the shores of Great Slave Lake.

The Yellowknife skyline is made up of four principal high rises that can be seen from all viewpoints: the Bellanca Building, blue with a Canada sign; the twin Scotia Centre and Precambrian Building, white with vertical striped glazing and dark violet caps; and the Northwestel Tower, teal green with vertical striped windows and distinctive green Northwestel logo. They are the focal points that define Yellowknife's urban silhouette.

This hidden part of town is School Draw. The view from School Draw is to Great Slaves Lake. It is the end of the skyline.

Five more multi-storeyed structures come in and out of view to complete the skyline from four distinct viewpoints in the City.

Two viewpoints are located by the Strip, a third one directly south of downtown, and the fourth from Old Town.

As you move from these viewpoints, the skyline immediately disappears from view, to be replaced by the immediate architecture that makes the various urban textures. This is an important feature of Yellowknife and the abrupt transition from these vistas with open space in the foreground to the urban fabric of each urban district can be emphasized, all the more since it is well supported by an equivalent transition in the road network, from boulevard to street.

Yellowknife's skyline is one of its urban design strengths. As we can see in plan, the foreground to all viewpoints are lakeshore and open space bedrock which are not likely to be either modified or built up. Similarly, revitalization and urban growth downtown can only positively contribute to the existing stock of high rises that define the skyline, and ultimately the city, with dramatic contrast against the natural setting.

The only element that will either detract or compliment this experience of the urban place is the texture of each district where these four strategic view points are located, and the progression in urban form from one view point to the next.

This is significant since it suggests that one strategy for improving and sustaining urban form in Yellowknife is to target the textural quality immediately adjacent to these viewpoints, with the quality of focal or nodal elements at or near these viewpoints, and how edges and networks connect these nodes and focal points. This in turn limits urban design interventions to these targets, with less attention needed for other areas.

These last views of the skyline are quite unique to Yellowknife but belong to the ice road, from Dettah and the houseboat marina. They show the Con mine towers lights and the Tin Can Hill Communication towner. At the other end, North of Downtown, street lights on 50th avenue link Franklin and Old Town.

OLD TOWN: QUIXOTIC TIMELESS ISLAND

JMB: Old Town is individualistic, close-knit, unapologetic. That is where fish is sold, where house-boats sit on ice, and where pedestrians, cars and cross-country skiers alike borrow the frozen lake, until the bustle of long summer days.

Old Town is more than quaint: it is a legacy, a lifestyle, history and a tradition.

Boats in their frozen slumber still hibernate.

Meanwhile, the marina thawes ever so slowly.

Old Town docks to downtown. A floatplane and a boat come handy with the second car, a the attached garage. You can't simply buy into it: you must learn and grow with it, and as you free yourself from urbanized ties and civilization, the city becomes one more playground, a home close to home.

Unique architecture, lakes, bedrock and boreal vegetation are hallmarks of this winter city. Old Town takes the lead and examplifies it the most. It is difficult to single out any one building for its exentricity. This set of houses, stacked as it seems, clinging to the rock, will serve as some of the best examples.

The intricate gambrel of the upper roof delineates the simple line of the lower building. Modern lines, impeccable architecture, whimsy and orchestrated geometry play with the vertical expanse of the bedrock. A roof-top greenhouse confirms by the certainty of its design that nothing is left to chance, and that artistry is meant as a vehicle of congruity.

Old Town takes your breath away gradually. One-way traffic divides to the right, loops back to the left and climbs up the middle. The balance between the rocky promontory and this crafted residence provides bold yet delicate entrance images. The urban design is so significant that title to this house is nothing short of art ownership.

On the other side by the bridge, the transition from peninsula to islet at the old float plane base is the site of a remarkably unusual apartment building. Ship-like and like a wharf anchored to bedrock, it even sports upper living quarters in what at first looks like exagerated roof-top-units. It is not to everyone's taste. Nonetheless it is undoubtedly unique and in keeping with the rest of Old Town's one-of-kind architecture.

DOWNTOWN: MAIN AXIS

JMB: Franklin Avenue, also known as 50th Avenue is the main axis in Yellowknife, from the entrance into downtown to where downtown ends by the lake as it turns into Old Town.

The first design elements at the entrance of town are symptomatic of the urban experience in Yellowknife. The diffuse urban context suddenly tightens. Residential images tumble to a stop at a church and a school around a bend in the boulevard.

Modern buildings and office towers are thrown at you, and the only reprieve comes from traffic lights and pedestrian crossings that give you a chance to absorb it all as they slow you down.

Mildred Hall Elementary School is a very modern building with unique - almost unusual architectural quality. It is fronted with a turn of last century log cabin.

The contrast in texture between the two is blended with bedrock that juts out of somewhat grassy, somewhat muddy ground. It is all enclosed with a jumble of chainlink fencing, distinctive light fixture and overhead power lines hanging off thick timber posts. There is a unique sense of pride, ambition and incompletion.

A finer and more detailed analysis reveals that Yellowknife's unique and bold choice of character and avant-garde architecture is undermined by the usual ills of the North American city: namely the grid, the back-alley and a lack of compact urban form, as the latter grew into a city from the former.

Outstanding architecture gets somewhat lost in the middle of holes in the urban fabric. And even with the utmost care and tidiness, the back-alley stays utilitarian before it becomes functional, and continuously competes against efforts to bring upscale quality to the front street.

In our modern towns the street - and ultimately the urban space - is not a social space. It is instead limited to being a functional thoroughfare for pedestrian and vehicles. Social activities are kept indoors - except for few annual events that hardly convert urban places to a cultural environment. And conversely, social spaces such as malls do not substitute for urban spaces.

The situation is compounded in Canadian cities, and all the more in Yellowknife, because of the weather. Yet, adequate urban design can make the urban space a center for social life, even in a winter city. Winter conditions actually foster the need for urban form at the pedestrian and human scale. But it is evident that our urban environments are not designed for the weather.

The grid is a winning formula for urban form at the small town scale - neat, tidy, orderly and business-like in a tendered hinterland. The challenge of the grid in the town that turns into a city, is that an investment in a town's architectural stock gets lost in the grid.
It requires for the whole grid to be re-developed for it to be revitalized. And as streets lengthen into avenues, the perspective becomes a set of lengthy corridors where buildings come in and out of focus as quickly as you go by them without hierarchy or anticipation.

In contrast, concentric cities from the nineteenth century in Europe require very little investment in their nodes for revitalization to be focused, immediate and successful. And these focal points continuously stand in the distance, no matter how far, and the more distant the more grand. Meanwhile, servicing is kept out of sight in the inner core of each city block.

Similarly, medieval walled cities in Asia, Europe or the Middle East provide a tight core which is a focus to the expanding metropolis they've become.

While the grid as a legacy from the Railway culture provides a unique and distinctive form at a smaller scale, it quickly exhausts itself in the modern metropolis. And because the grid is rectilinear, creating nodes will be more successful in providing punctuation and destinations than focal points.

To make matters worse, the geometry of the grid combine with the stack effect from tall building to effectively turn the street into a wind tunnel. The weather engulfs and augments from one end to the next, whirls at every crossing, while gusts slap down from above.

Similarly, the grid in Yellowknife makes it almost impossible to truly enjoy the remarkable architecture along Franklin Avenue. Instead, as it often happens in North American cities, the street becomes a long corridor, where run-down structures and utilitarian components such as communication towers compete with distinctive buildings.

That is truly unfortunate, since some significant buildings with bold and yet sensitive architecture punctuate the rythm and provide vital urban spaces. The Greenstone building depicted
here is the newest and most successful example.

Across the street however, blank run-down facades bereft of windows, with quasi boarded doors, shelter social tragedy as it finds harbour there since no-one else claims this key strech of the street. As such it pretty much sterilizes this unique urban space on the other side.

Nothing in this revitalized urban space provides relief from mother nature, so that this quite remarkable little urban square goes unused and stays empty. Additional design would capitalize on the positive social opportunities at the street level between the truly beautiful marriage between the Greenstone Building and the Northwestel Tower.

At the time of this writing though, a demolition permit is posted on the door of the derelict building (the Gallery), and the property is expected to be redeveloped with an office building. This will have a major impact on Franklin Avenue and downtown Yellowknife as a whole. The new building will combine with the new Greenstone building and the Northwestel tower across the street to create an major urban place in Yellowknife.

The linearity of Franklin Avenue notwithstanding, the sinuous weaving of 49th Avenue along Frame Lake's waterfront, to Capital Area and to one of Yellowknife's downtown gateway is another great opportunity for urban design in downtown Yellowknife.

By accentuating the street linkage between 49th and 50th avenues, a dynamic tension can be created to balance the entrance at Mildred School, the exit towards Old Town and the Gateway at Capital Area and the Explorer Hotel.

This dynamic tension can be used to orchestrate the reduction of blight, to guide meaning and accent with redevelopment and additions, and to complement existing social patterns downtown: school and family; business and office life; movie theater and coffee shop; lunch and drinks; malls and shopping; hotels, night-life and tourism.

As purposeful design melds function with tradition, meaningful urban form nurtures the rise of local culture from social events.

In this next view of Franklin Avenue, we see the remainder of the Avenue as it terminates at the other end of downtown from metropolitan to heritage cultural and the waterfront. The tight - albeit at times ragged - urban fabric of the downtown core dissolves just as suddenly as it had come together. It is an abrupt transition in land uses through urban edge and rural fringe without a design element taking a strong role either as a focal point or as a node.

From downtown though, the view is preserved as is the draw to Old Town. Pocket size metropolis with all three levels of government, headquarters for the Territory and gateway to the Arctic - Downtown may still ponder this connection to Old Town from umbilical chord to parade route.