An Architecture School Takes Over a Calgary Tower — With a Colour-Coded Design by HCMA

The abandoned headquarters of an oil and gas company is not where you would normally expect to find a pre-eminent school of design. And yet, HCMA Architecture + Design has crafted the new home of the University of Calgary’s School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape (SAPL) in The Valentine building at 801 7 Avenue S.W., designed by Fred Valentine and completed in 1982, where the NOVA Corporation had its offices up until 2013. The 37-storey tower is a Governor General’s Award—winning study in late modernism, and its good bones made it a worthy — if surprising — candidate to be revived as a design school.

Tall office building at dusk with illuminated windows, glass entrance, and reflections. Street and skybridge visible in foreground, with another building in the background.

A tall office building is illuminated at night with people and blurred city buses visible on the street in front.

SAPL had outgrown its original footprint at the university; prior to moving into the tower in January 2026, its programs were dispersed across several buildings on campus and within the city’s former Central Library. The relocation, which required both a refurbishment and interior overhaul, constituted an object lesson in good design. The feat emphasizes adaptive re-use as a way to re-activate a downtown core (the tower is connected to Calgary’s +15 Skyway Network, near the C-Train LRT, and adjacent Century Gardens Park) that was deeply impacted by the pandemic and then-plummeting energy prices.

Modern office space with people working, walking, and talking at a reception desk. Open layout includes glass walls, wood finishes, shelves, and overhead lighting.

To invest back into the core, and to repurpose existing office buildings to new and enduring uses, the City of Calgary initiated a number of incentive programs. One is the Downtown Office Conversion Program, which saw 21 projects transform “2.68 million square feet of empty downtown office space into more than 2,600 new homes, hotel rooms, and student or co-living spaces.” Another saw the city work with REEF, which manages vast swathes of parking real estate, turning these assets into community hubs. Most crucial to the SAPL project, the city instituted the Downtown Post-Secondary Institution Incentive Program, which encouraged Calgary’s post-secondary institutions to “establish or increase their presence downtown.” (Conversely, the City also launched an office demolition incentive program, for developers to raze underused buildings unsuitable for conversion and replace them with mixed-use amenities and services.)

A woman walks toward the camera on a red floor in a modern hallway with elevators, while another person walks past a yellow wall marked “804.”.

The establishment of SAPL’s new premises, a CAD$30-million undertaking that received funding through the program, now stands as a glowing example of the program’s success. Quite literally: At night, the building is fully expressed to the outside world, its floors partially painted in UCalgary red and gold — the colours reflected onto its ceiling to amplify the school’s bold takeover of the tower’s nine lower levels (16,722 square metres altogether) as well as the three floors of an annex building.

People walk and gather in a modern building with bright red floors, a circular yellow-walled room, and exposed ceilings. Some sit against the wall, while others interact in the central room.

For the school, its faculty and student body, the project was an opportunity to “embody SAPL’s core values and extend its ambitions well beyond its walls, positioning the school to catalyze Calgary’s economic recovery, model urban revitalization, and drive tangible improvements in the surrounding neighbourhood,” according to the project press release.

People stand and walk in a modern hallway with a red floor; a group is visible through a glass wall inside a meeting room.

HCMA is a firm with a keen sensibility for crafting community amenities where culture and community are expressed through innovative architecture; they’ve received significant praise and awards for their recreation centres — including the təməsew̓txʷ Aquatic and Community Centre in Westminster, B.C — that exemplify social and environmental resilience.

A group of people sit on chairs facing a wall where a woman presents materials; one person opens a sliding divider in a modern office with red flooring and large windows.

At SAPL, the firm’s ethos is put to brilliant use, and its expertise in programming active environments comes across in the dynamism of its layout design here. The school begins at ground level, with a community-facing City Lab and a connection to the adjacent three-storey annex, which supports hands-on making. Throughout the levels above, the floor plates are arranged around the existing concrete core, which is also given new uses: Its walls feature an armature for mobile pin-up boards and a steel canopy overhead acts as a subtle circulation device. The core also splits the floors into two sections: colour-coded and classroom-oriented, and neutral (read: polished concrete floors) and open work in myriad configurations.

People in a modern, industrial-style studio review architectural drawings and models displayed on walls, benches, and the floor, with large windows providing natural light.

The architects aligned new interventions — workstations, classrooms and macro-furniture — with the chamfered geometry of the building and along the city grid. The workstations are positioned in rows at a 45-degree angle and the building’s existing “notches” were layered over with surfacing and clad in hot-rolled steel to achieve “sharp points.” The classrooms, envisioned as freestanding objects, are in many shapes — some circular, some orthogonal, and painted in hues that make them pop even more.

Modern office lounge with people sitting and standing, large graphic wall on the left, and a glass display shelf in front of city windows in the background.

For crits — the terror-inducing bane of many an architecture student — the architects devised friendly timber-framed nooks that students will have the opportunity to dress up with their own temporary cladding designs. Students also get to display their models on a shelving unit against the city-facing windows, further identifying the school as a locus of creativity in the downtown core.

Modern open office with people working at desks, a wooden structure in the center, and two people discussing drawings on a black wall. Large windows provide city views and natural light.

People work in a modern open-plan office; some sit at desks with computers, while others stand near dark boards displaying papers and sketches.

Just as the floor paint on every level provides an immediate reminder of where you are, the wayfinding throughout is clear, bold and joyful. HCMA designed a graphic system around the school’s acronym that “playfully conveys a distinct personality that echoes the building’s verticality.” Complementing the building’s character, the graphics form a striking counterpoint to the exposed ductwork and concrete shell of the interior.

A person stands at a white counter in a modern office space with exposed ceilings, red flooring, and large windows.

Often, when we try to picture an inspiring adaptive reuse project, it involves a building from another epoch completely. But the SAPL project and others that, like it, turn our attention to how we can imaginatively repurpose structures from recent history, argue for an expansion of the definition of heritage- or preservation-worthy architecture. And when they are crafted with this much care, they prove their thesis.