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.