Audio Transcript

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If you look to your right, you’ll see a large, white, stone building on the corner of 8th Avenue Southwest and 2nd Street Southwest. This is the Canada Life Assurance Building and it’s one of the more substantial buildings in downtown Calgary! It was built between 1912 and 1913, during the city’s housing boom right before World War One.

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The architects of the building, Brown and Vallance, were influenced by an architectural style that gave it a look that was sort of futuristic for the time! The building is six storeys high, but if it seems taller than that to you, that’s actually by design! Brown and Vallance decided to split the building into three different sections.

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The first is the main floor shop windows, then a number of storeys for office space, and lastly a projecting cornice on the top. All of this was to give the impression that the building has more height than it really does! It’s almost like the whole building is standing on its tippy-toes!

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