30 Apartments and 1 Office

I don't particularly like modeling apartment buildings, but occasionally I'm hit with a need for completeness. This set has a few buildings in the McKay Avenue area, along with a lot in southeast Oliver and Grandin. Previously I hadn't done anything in that area, but this should fill it in nicely.


Hillside Estates North & South, Dunedin House and McDougall Place


Grandin Green and the David Thompson


Park Towers, the Panorama and the Edgehill


Central Park, the Trethway, Dorchester House & Maureen Manor


Valhalla and Victoria Park Tower


York House, Bondell Tower, Lancaster House & the DeVille


Academy Place and Windsor Arms


Capital Place, Tower on the Park and Grandin Manor


Westwind Estates and Le Jardin


Tegler Manor, Rosedale Place, Westcliffe Arms and Grandin Towers


Cathedral Court

Apartment buildings are a really great way to learn how to do photereferenced models in Sketchup. If you're interested in taking a crack at modeling they are the absolute best place to start because apartment buildings are impossible to screw up.

In the same way that they are impossible to screw up they are also almost impossible to do really well. There are three or four different ways to model balconies (all on display here), and none of them are good. With a model like the Baker Clinic, QE II Planetarium or SAGE you can strip away the questionable additions, the neglect, and the urban clutter to reveal the hidden intent. With an apartment building there's nothing hidden - it's a box; or in this case many, many boxes. Apartments get pretty boring once the initial learning is over.

Probably the most interesting thing about these models is seeing "families" of buildings pop up. There are the obvious ones like Hillside Estates North and South; and the more recent Grandin Manor, Grand Central Manor, Lord Strathcona Manor, etc.  There are also:

The David Thompson and Capital Centre
The Edgehill and Victoria Park Towers
Maureen Manor, York House, Academy Place, Windsor Arms and several more I haven't gotten to.
Grandin Towers and Jasper House
Le Jardin, Jasper 111 and Rocky Mountain Court in Calgary

10830 Jasper Avenue

Model and Building information


Model and Building Information

It was however, a building doomed by its material choices. The drab concrete lattice over the drab brown brick is tough to defend, and the building probably looked tired and dirty on the day that it opened. Maybe if the brick had been red or if the lattice was a shiny aluminum then there would have been more affection for the building, or at least it might have been less disliked. The new version and all of its crazy shapes upholds the quirkiness of the original, but I do wish that they'd somehow managed to integrate the lattice into the new design.

This will mark the fifth shiny blue office building prominently visible from Jasper Avenue (sixth if you count all the way down to 124st). With it's odd shape there is no real risk that it will be confused with any of the others, but some diversity wouldn't hurt. Downtown Edmonton is already a sea of brutalist concrete, and I'm not sure that striking back with a wave of reflective blue monoliths is the way to go. Would another Bell or Canadian Western Bank have been too much to ask?

One nice change is that the windows are a slightly different blue than the spandrel panels below them. This combined with the exaggerated horizontal mullions and the hidden vertical mullions gives it a banded appearance, rather than the uniformity of Manulife or the new Devonian. I think they could have gone a bit further with it though, either darkening the spandrels or making the windows more transparent (humbug to energy efficiency). The banding is prominent but it doesn't quite pop, and on a cloudy day you might not even notice it.

The building is also subject to the same height restrictions that have led to downtown Edmonton's many cubic "high-rises" which are as tall as they are wide. 10830 is actually quite a bit wider than it is tall, but the manic massing tries to hide that. That seems to be the approach Procura will be taking with all of its developments in the area, which should feel more interesting than the duplo-blocks-as-urban-design approach of the government area a few blocks to the south.

It also goes without saying that the new retail spaces will be such a welcome addition to Jasper, in an area that has been a black hole for a decade? More?

9908 106 Street

Model and Building information

There's something really peculiar about lifting a building 10' off the ground, so that people can drive under it to the parking lot in the back, even though that lot is already well served by an alley. What is the message there? Is it about the North American and Edmontonian tendency to place the importance of the automobile above all else? Or a commentary on the frightening urbanity of dirty downtown alleys? Or is it just showing off?

It's a very simple and fun little building though, and I probably would have liked it with or without the stilts.

Brownlee Building and IBM Building

Model and Building information

The Brownlee building is just a really, really fat building. And although I normally like pilotis, the huge wings of this building and their closeness to the ground are just so heavy. The roundness, and the tiering, and the strange stepped detail on the front all contribute to making it feel like the whole building is being yanked down by gravity, with only the columns holding it up. That might have been the intention, but I'm not a fan. The actual pattern of the glazing and spandrels is quite attractive and interesting though.

I've heard that the architect of the Brownlee building was the same one who designed the IBM building at 44 Capital Boulevard. My Brownlee Building model is much, much better than my earlier model of the IBM building:


Model and Building information

The Federal Building

Building Information:

9820-107th Street NW
10 stories, 36m/120', 17,000 to 22,000 sqft floorplates, 256,000sqft total.

The Federal Building was designed by Edmonton architect George Heath MacDonald in 1939, however it was not built until the late 1950's following World War II. In 1988 the Federal government moved its offices to Canada Place, and the Federal Building has been vacant ever since.

(Source: Real Estate Weekly)

Model Commentary:

I love the Federal Building. It's possibly my favorite building in Edmonton.

My mother worked there when I was young, and so I have a mish-mash of fond half-memories of visiting her there, and of being awed by all the tiny little people and cars ten stories below.

The Federal Building is also something of an underdog because it has been abandoned since 1988. There have been several proposals to revive it over the last two decades, but they have all fallen through. You have to keep hoping though, that one day the right one will come along, and that the building will be revived as something amazing.

Honestly though, the main reason that I love the Federal Building is this:



Is there anything that conveys the concept of blandness better than the three words "Canadian Federal Government?" And yet once upon a time the Federal Government had a building with lightning bolt door handles.

That. Is. Awesome.

The Federal Building is great because it is art deco, and because Edmonton has very few art deco buildings. I can think of only six others - two hospitals, two schools and two theatres. I'm not sure why there are so few, but it is probably because when art deco was at its peak the prairies were at a low point.

As for the model itself, when I made it I still didn't know what I was doing, but I do think that it turned out well. If I were building it today I would do many things differently, but I'm in no rush to "fix" it.