The Downtown Question

For years, downtown Calgary was organized around the office workday.

People arrived in the morning, moved through lobbies, sidewalks, coffee shops, and storefronts, then left again by evening. Over time, that pattern shaped more than the daily energy of the core. It shaped the buildings themselves: towers that prioritized daytime occupancy, commercial circulation, and a steady flow of workers moving in and out on a predictable schedule.

That rhythm is no longer as reliable as it once was. Hybrid work, changing tenant needs, and the draw of newer, amenity-rich office space have left many older B- and C-class buildings at a crossroads. While some no longer fit the expectations of today’s office tenants, their value remains. These buildings still hold central locations and connect to established infrastructure. Their structures, envelopes, and street relationships can often be reconsidered for new uses.

The City of Calgary’s office conversion program has turned that condition into one of the city’s most visible downtown strategies. The program currently supports 21 office conversion projects, transforming 2.68 million square feet of office space into new homes, hotel rooms, and other uses.

These numbers point to progress, but they don’t tell the whole story. The real question is what comes next and how a building shaped for one kind of downtown life can be thoughtfully adapted to support another.

Incentive programs can reduce some of the financial risk that comes with taking on older buildings, but they don’t make every building a good candidate. Floor plates, cores, daylight, code requirements, access, structure, and street-level relationships still have to be worked through on a building-by-building basis.

Beyond the 9-to-5 Core

Jonny Hehr, Partner at GGA, describes parts of downtown Calgary as having long experienced a kind of 5 o’clock exodus. The core fills during the workday, then quiets as people head home, to restaurants, for recreation, and into community life elsewhere.

Office conversions start to shift that pattern, one building at a time. When a former office tower becomes housing, its connection to downtown life changes. The building no longer serves only workday routines. Residents use the surrounding sidewalks, parks, restaurants, transit, and shops at all hours. They bring activity into evenings, weekends, and the quieter times that office buildings were not built to support.

The Sullivan, formerly known as Palliser One, is an example of this shift at a meaningful scale. Its ongoing conversion transforms over 400,000 square feet of former office space into more than 400 rental homes, with 25 percent of units dedicated to affordable housing. Where there was once commercial use, the project brings new residential density, amenities, and a steadier daily presence to the downtown core.

One conversion does not remake a district on its own. But when several buildings begin to support residential life, the surrounding blocks start to work differently, with more reasons for people to be downtown beyond the office day.

The Value Already Standing

Before an office building can take on a new role, it needs to be understood for what it already offers. An underused building may lack tenants or activity, but it is rarely without value. Structure, embodied carbon, location, urban presence, and infrastructure are already present. Many older buildings also hold heritage value, civic memory, or a visible relationship to the street that new construction would struggle to replicate.

GGA’s ongoing work on the Barron Building brings this into focus. Originally built in 1951, the Art Moderne tower was Calgary’s first skyscraper and remains a designated Municipal Historic Resource. Reimagining it for residential use is not simply a matter of inserting units into former office floors. It means working with a piece of Calgary’s downtown identity and allowing it to support contemporary life without losing the character that made it significant in the first place.

That responsibility guided the design approach. With its heritage status and place in Calgary’s downtown history, the Barron Building conversion preserves key heritage elements and introduces clear, contemporary interventions. About 120 residential rental units, rooftop amenities, and street-level retail give the building a renewed daily purpose, while maintaining the character that ties it to Calgary’s story and showing how design can support both continuity and change.

This is one of the more meaningful opportunities in office conversion. It asks designers to look closely at what is already there, to see both the limitations and the potential. The aim is not just to fill empty space, but to understand how an existing building can continue to serve the city in a new way.

The Conversion Puzzle

Recognizing value in an existing building is only the beginning. The real challenge is translating that value into a use that the building was not originally designed to support.

From a distance, these projects can seem straightforward: take an office building and turn it into housing. In reality, the building is never a blank slate. Floor plates, columns, cores, stairs, elevators, parking, glazing, structure, and systems are already set. Some elements can change, others must be worked around. These conditions are often only fully understood once the building is opened up and its layers of past use are revealed.

As Jonny notes, adaptive reuse is part investigation, part problem-solving. This work is a kind of architectural puzzle. The pieces already exist, but they were not arranged for new use. Unlike new construction, where the design team can organize the building around the intended program from the beginning, a conversion asks the team to work with decisions already made. The challenge is understanding what can move, what must remain, and how fixed conditions can be reworked into something coherent.

Each building brings its own logic. A tower from the 1950s does not pose the same questions as one from the 1980s. Structural systems, mechanical strategies, floor plate depths, envelope conditions, code requirements, accessibility, permitting, and past renovations all shape what is possible long before a unit plan is drawn.

Floor Plates and Fixed Conditions

Floor plate depth is one example. Many office buildings are deeper than typical residential buildings, which can complicate unit planning. Living spaces often sit near the exterior, where daylight is strongest. Bedrooms may be placed deeper within the unit, supported by borrowed or shared light. At first, this can seem like a compromise. In a downtown setting, it can become an advantage, providing sleeping areas with greater separation from street noise and late-night activity.

Where Buildings Meet the City

A successful office conversion is not measured only by the number of units. The ground plane matters, especially in buildings first designed for office circulation. Entrances, lobbies, retail frontages, glazing, lighting, plazas, patios, and sidewalk connections all influence whether a building feels closed off from downtown or connected to it.

Neoma shows how far that impact can reach. Formerly Sierra Place, the project transformed a vacant office building into affordable housing, shelter space, childcare, and support services. In collaboration with HomeSpace, it includes eighty-two affordable housing units, ten transitional shelter units, an emergency family shelter, childcare, and wraparound programming. Inn From the Cold also relocated its operations into the building.

The design needed to support more than residential occupancy. Barrier-free suites, family support areas, shared programming spaces, and trauma-informed design all shaped how the building could serve its users. The exterior also played a role. The transparent podium, exterior lighting, and bright window reveals support safety, wayfinding, and a stronger sense of identity. Together, these moves make the building easier to use and more connected to the people it serves.

These elements help residents orient themselves, feel a sense of ownership, and move safely between home, services, and the street. When a conversion is done with care, the building gives back more than square footage or unit count. It can offer access, services, dignity, and a stronger connection to the surrounding city.

A Different Downtown Rhythm

Calgary’s downtown will continue to need office space, but a healthier core depends on embracing a broader, more flexible pattern of use. As work and daily life change, so do expectations for what downtown can be.

Office conversions are one of the city’s most visible responses to this shift. By reimagining existing buildings, Calgary opens opportunities for new homes, services, amenities, and street-level activity. These uses extend downtown life beyond the business day.

This asks us as designers to understand the building itself, the changing city around it, and the people who will use it next. Heritage, embodied value, location, building systems, and relationship to the street all shape which buildings are suited for new purposes and how they can contribute to downtown life.

Not every office building should become housing, and not every conversion will work. That is exactly why design judgment matters. The real opportunity is not simply to fill vacant space, but to ask what role these buildings can play in the next chapter of downtown Calgary.

Cities evolve. Buildings can too.