Alberta resort village draws from medieval design

The New Urban Design Group in Calgary, Alberta, is working on a resort village in the Canadian Rockies that will take its inspiration from some of the great hill towns in Europe. The project, Silvertip Village, is one of several new urbanist developments worldwide that applies ideas from medieval towns and villages.
Roughly 1,400 dwellings, nearly all of them apartments and condominium units in buildings three to six stories high, will be part of the village, in a beautiful, rugged setting in Canmore, about a ten-minute drive from Alberta’s famous Banff resort and about 60 miles west of Calgary. Jaydean Boldt, principal in New Urban Design Group, says Calgary-based Stonecreek Resorts Inc. intends to construct the village on a ledge in the mountains where it will be part of a 200-acre development that already has a golf course and other amenities.
The project began with what was described as typical suburban resort planning exercises. “Nothing really fit with the client until I suggested taking a completely different approach,” one revolving around the idea of incorporating medieval town planning practices into the village’s master plan, says Boldt, who grew up in Mainz, Germany, and was familiar with the narrow, irregular streets and the intimate scale of European towns dating to the Middle Ages.
Stonecreek President Guy Turcotte liked the idea, and “three months later we were off on a whirlwind trip through 26 cities and villages in nine days,” says Boldt. “In Switzerland, France, and Italy, we took over 3,000 pictures, measured buildings and sizes of piazzas and squares, and observed some of the functionalty of these towns and villages.”
“The site is approximately 60 acres, with slightly under half of it being retained as natural forest,” Boldt explains. “The site is long and slender, and slopes over 100 meters [328 feet] from the north to the south, making for very interesting slope-adaptive building types interspersed with a central square, a series of piazzas, a central pedestrian-only commercial spine, streets, walkways, alleys, passages with stairs, and sloped walkways. Boldt is now working on approvals for the development.

‘playful’ town planning
“It’s a more playful and organic way to look at town planning,” Boldt says of this approach. “The traditional grid can be static; it’s so defined by the alley and the lane.” Medieval plans tend to be cranky and organic. “The blocks and buildings define the streets, rather than the streets defining the blocks,” Boldt observes. Often the result is an intricate network of streets, alleys, walkways, and mews.
In Silvertip Village, “view angles and terminated vistas play a very important role,” Boldt says. “There will be a series of hotels, condominium apartment buildings, and an authentic cathedral centered on one of the squares. To accommodate emergency vehicles, the development will have some larger streets as well. All parking will be underground or on the streets.
Construction is expected to start next year on the village’s first phase, which calls for a small piazza with a fountain, a hotel, several restaurants and shops, a market, and a spa with a pool.
The initial building, designed by New Urban Design Group, will be the marketing and sales center. Architectural patterns are predominantly inspired by the simplicity of the European hill town vernacular and by the original Rocky Mountain Style, which was rooted in the same European vernacular.
Three mixed-use condominium buildings and a hotel are being designed by Urban Design Associates under Greg Weimerskirch. The stand-alone spa and six other buildings constituting three blocks are being designed by Pier Carlo Bontempi architecture in Parma, Italy. Leon Krier is designing the conference center and the surrounding plaza.