It will dominate the skyline, but its greatest impact may be at ground level. Covering two city blocks, it will feature a plaza, 100,000 square feet of cultural space, 200,000 square feet of retail, and an arcaded walkway. It will do for Calgary, said architect Jeremy Sturgess — whose local firm, Sturgess Page + Steel, is responsible for the street-level aspects of the project — what Rockefeller Center did for New York in the 1930s. Rockefeller Center was a grand architectural statement, and its art deco design retains its iconic place on the skyline. Like Foster’s buildings, it introduced technological innovations (being the first skyscraper to use high-speed elevators, for one). But Rockefeller Center’s greatest impact was in creating a public square on its twenty-two acres, a natural meeting place that was an innovative mix of retail and cultural facilities (among them Radio City Music Hall and the famous skating rink).

Foster’s will be Calgary’s first large building of architectural significance, a surprise. The city has the money for big architecture, and it has the mentality, the new wealth that comes home one day with two gold Cadillacs just to let the neighbours know. There are few more dramatic ways to draw attention to one’s city or one’s corporation, and yet through four oil booms this is only the second grand architectural gesture (the first, arguably, was the Husky Tower). Why?

Some of Calgary’s mundane architecture is the result of the haste with which it was constructed. During the 1970s boom, many new downtown buildings were owned by eastern concerns, and much of that architecture has an undistinguished, absentee quality. There is something else, though, a democratic impulse that prizes egalitarianism, an impulse that competes with Calgary’s corporate egotism. Like America, it is a place where anyone can grow up to be president. It elected Ralph Klein, who understood the appeal of the little guy; as a rumpled reporter, he fought city hall, then he became city hall and fought himself. Under Klein, as it had been under his predecessors and would be under his successors, the city planning department was effectively neutered. It produced visions of what could be done, but the plans were largely ignored. The political will was absent, and the city was a developers’ playground. Still, it was a fair reflection of the people’s will; its utilitarianism and shaded corridors, its convenience and generic architecture were not unwelcome. Meanwhile, the suburbs continued their steady march.

And now EnCana is leading the charge to create an urban core. It is leading the charge elsewhere as well: as the most powerful and vocal antagonist to any change in the oil and gas royalty regime. If the recommendations of Alberta’s Royalty Review Panel are implemented, the company said in late September, it would shift $1 billion in investment outside of Alberta. This was a pre-emptive strike, delivered before Premier Ed Stelmach had taken any action, a flexing of corporate muscle.

EnCana was created in 2002 by the merger of PanCanadian and the Alberta Energy Company, the latter set up by the Lougheed government in 1975 to allow Albertans to benefit from the province’s natural resources. Citizens invested in the company, and the government maintained a controlling interest. It was part of Lougheed’s plan, along with such initiatives as the Heritage Fund, to ensure that the resource wealth benefited Albertans. Under Klein’s blithe tenure, this plan atrophied (as did the Heritage Fund itself), replaced by a glad-handing vacuum. In the absence of political leadership, the resource companies have provided it themselves. As the largest Canadian oil and gas producer, EnCana has seized the reins. Formerly a government operation, newly self-made, independent, and already indignant: a shining symbol.

Alberta trades in symbols more heavily than most provinces. Perhaps EnCana is a fitting symbol, with its conflicted legacy and Freudian worries: its father was a bureaucrat, and you have to kill your father to live your own life. A corporate bully with government blood, it is repudiating the city’s suburban history, and helping to create an enlightened core. It is the new Calgary.

On October 25, 2007, the new Alberta arrived in town. With his announcement that oil and gas royalties would be increasing, Ed Stelmach signalled that the government was no longer simply the industry’s golf partner. The increases fell short of what the Royalty Review Panel advocated, were tied to the price of oil and gas, and wouldn’t be implemented until 2009, but the industry felt betrayed. It was significant that Stelmach came to Calgary to make his announcement, enemy territory both in terms of oil interests, which saw his populist decision as heretical, and in terms of the increasingly cosmopolitan citizens, who see him as a rural anachronism, an emblem of the province’s past, not its future.

In the past several years, there has been a hesitant political realization that Calgary will be judged by its urban centre rather than its outlying suburbs. There is a new mayor, this time competent and managerial, and now downtown is on the cusp of a transformation. Norman Foster is seen variously as a glamorous saviour, or as a carpetbagging Brit whose immediate legacy will be a year of satanic traffic (Sixth Avenue, a main east-west artery, will be closed for almost a year). In Foster’s favour is the fact that the city, its population having surpassed a million now, is evolving in a way that may embrace his particular vision. There was a time in the 1970s when, with my well-honed sense of undergraduate persecution, it seemed that the 470,000-odd citizens were singing in nasal unison, a conservative choir lifted toward the heavens and against me. Calgary was almost Aryan in its homogeneity, a perception reinforced by regular visits from pairs of more or less identical blond Mormons, who are a force in the area and whose visits I oddly enjoyed. But now the city has succumbed to multiculturalism; it can no longer trust itself to be Cowtown.

Sir Norman Foster isn’t the first Brit to come to Calgary and present a hopeful vision of the future. In the first decade of the twentieth century, Calgary grew from 5,000 to 45,000 people, and in 1912 a British architect and planner named Thomas Mawson came through town and recognized the ingredients for urban greatness — money, growth, ambition — and a provincial mentality that his suave British manner could exploit. Mawson addressed the Canadian Club of Calgary, delivering a speech titled “The City on the Plain and How to Make It Beautiful.” Calgary had already built a dramatic sandstone city hall in Romanesque revival style, and in the first of what would be many acts of civic hubris planted 200 palm trees, all but one of which died during the first winter.

Mawson was hired by city council to come up with an urban scheme to compete with those of Paris or Washington. His plan, rendered in elegant watercolours, was based on European models, with wide promenades, arcaded sidewalks, riverside parks, grand plazas, and the three-storey École des Beaux Arts buildings. The Fourth Street Bridge was modelled on the Pont Alexandre iii in Paris. The cpr and cnr stations faced each other along a dramatic plaza, making one’s first impression of the city memorable. With its boat slips along the Bow River, it looked like a cross between Venice and Pierre L’Enfant’s Washington.