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.