Photography by Ewan Nicholson

In early 2004, a new giant of the Canadian energy industry needed room to work and grow even bigger. Fewer than two years after Encana Corp.’s creation by the merger of Alberta Energy Co. and PanCanadian Energy, the combination needed lots of space.

“We were in numerous buildings – and still are – and were looking to how we could bring everyone together in one place,” recalls Craig Reardon, Encana’s vice-president of administration. “So we were looking at our long-term real estate strategy.”

Calgary’s downtown had a lot of projects in progress at the time and Encana looked at them all. But the corporation needed more than a million square feet, so the practical solution was to build its own tower. “That’s one of the things that drove us,” says Reardon.

Enter the Bow, a steel-framed colossus that the project’s big audience of sidewalk superintendents say evokes images of Manhattan or Chicago skyscrapers – and, while under construction before walls are fitted into the beams, the Eiffel Tower in Paris. But the future occupants emphasize that their big new home is no monument to corporate ego.

That Encana ended up erecting an icon, which will top and transform Calgary’s skyline, wasn’t in the plan. Driving the single building idea, and its stunning design, was corporate culture. Reardon says the building was designed from the inside out with paramount consideration for employees and the way the company works.

Encana’s internal structure is an array of business units that foster and maintain the entrepreneurial spirit of nimble small firms within a large organization. “A typical large business unit team is 200 to 250 people, and we wanted to make sure they were within two or three floors of each other,” says Reardon. That meant getting 75 to 90 people per floor where most buildings have 50 to 70. The business unit structure and membership roster size were the start of the shopping list that Encana’s leaders took to architectural firms.

“We started out with the executive team and spent a lot of time with them getting their design criteria – what they were looking for – figured out,” says Reardon. “And the primary driver of the design was the way Encana works as a company: with business units of a certain size and making sure the design accommodated having those business units in space that worked for them. So we wanted, first of all, to get really clear on our business objectives and put together the floor plate and the groupings of floors for the business units.”

Next, the firm set up a team to translate the executives’ visions into practical guidance for the architects. “What we did was assemble a group of 12 to 14 people in the organization that represented various constituencies – the geophysicists, the engineers, the finance people, and so on, and we called that our design advisory team,” says Reardon. “We worked with them after we got the executive piece figured out and some of the subtle nuances of the way some of these groups worked together.”

Then, for the broader employee population, the planners did four or five surveys on the kinds of attributes that the workers wanted to see in the building. “They wanted to have the best view in terms of sightlines. They wanted workspace that was bright and well lit. They wanted air flow inside the building.” In a rare departure from the totally enclosed interiors that prevail in downtown Calgary, “Some of the windows along the front will open and allow fresh air in.”

Encana at the time had no idea what kind of exterior look the company might end up with. “We wanted to make sure the shape of the building allowed for our business unit teams to work together.”

Nor did the firm decide it wanted to have the highest office building in Western Canada. “We certainly didn’t start out with that in mind. We weren’t at all focused on the height of the building,” says Reardon. “It was the number of staff we had and the expected growth over time and having everyone in a contiguous block of space.”

Armed with these deliberations, Encana went shopping for architectural firms that could work closely with them to come up with a design that would accommodate the company wish list. “We looked seriously at Foster, and four other architectural firms,” says Reardon. “We gave them all our design parameters, and ended up going with Foster as they saw our business needs most clearly and were the most responsive to our business needs.”

Foster + Partners looked at several different shapes to work with the land Encana had purchased in the heart of downtown Calgary, near Centre Street and Sixth Avenue. “They came up with the curved design and steel girder concept,” says Reardon. The process took almost a year. “There were a number of iterations including those to the bow shape.”

James Barnes remembers the initial work. “Encana had written a very broad brush outline brief which described the basics of what they were looking for but not a great deal of detail,” he recalls over the telephone from his riverside London, U.K., office. Barnes, the Bow’s project architect, is a partner in the firm of Foster + Partners and was fresh from designing the ultramodern sweeping curves of the McLaren Technology Centre in Woking, U.K.

Barnes and his team went to work in the manner they always do – first things first. “Once we got onto the project, the first thing was to understand the company and to understand the way they work and the way they wanted to use their building – what they were actually looking for.”

Barnes says to begin with Encana had a rough idea of its desires, “but it took many months of working very closely with them to fully understand what they wanted.” The method is typical of the way architects approach any new design.

From the sketchy beginnings, the design’s emergence was a model of form following function as a broad brush practical need slowly morphed into a striking object of civic art. “We went through iteration after iteration,” says Barnes. “What we did was get together for a number of workshops both here in London and in Calgary. We toured their facilities, met with key staff, and went through several changes before we developed what you’ll see on the skyline. We like to have the client very heavily involved so it’s not us working in isolation. They are part of the design work. Together we develop a design that suits them best.”

Once the architecture team had spent a lot of time with Encana and learned how the firm worked, it became obvious to design the building from the inside out, says Barnes. “We looked at the way the staff worked. They work in cellular offices, each with their 10 x 15 space,” he says. “And they also like to work in very specific team sizes so it was important to get a certain number of people on a floor plate in close proximity to each other, while at the same time offering them a unique working experience you couldn’t get anywhere else in downtown Calgary.”

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