Crown
Rooftop panels on the twelve tallest office roofs, 159.8 m and up.
See crown inventory →OfficeBuildings.ca / Calgary office city · 3D
Calgary office city · 3DDowntown Calgary in three dimensions, from the public record.
18,089 LiDAR structures and 611 office building sites, rendered in the browser by OfficeBuildings.ca’s own engine. Drag to orbit, right-drag or shift-drag to pan, scroll to zoom, click a building for its record.
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This browser cannot run the WebGL2 city. The static downtown map, skyline and every building profile carry the same record.
How to read the model
Colour and light encode the record; nothing is styled by hand.
Day and time of day
Grey blocks are every other structure in the core. Assessed office sites take a façade family from their construction era on the City roll: sandstone and masonry before 1950, concrete and bronze glass 1950–79, dark curtain wall 1980–99, light glass after 2000. The sun moves with the time slider from an eastern sunrise through a southern noon to a western sunset; the sky and haze follow.
Night
As the sun sets, windows light up procedurally at a 3.3 m by 3.9 m rhythm per wall, seeded by the building identifier, so the pattern is stable between visits. Billboards glow. Nothing represents actual occupancy or lighting.
Terrain and ground
The ground is a heightfield interpolated from the measured ground elevation at every LiDAR structure in the record, so the Bow valley drops, the Crescent Heights bluff rises and every building stands at its true base. The ground carries the City’s street centrelines at class widths, the Bow and Elbow rivers lowered into their channels, parks, CP rail, CTrain tracks, the unbuilt Green Line alignment and public trees sized from recorded trunk diameter. Blueprint draws roof and corner edges as lines over a navy fill.
Controls
Orbit: drag orbits, right-drag or shift-drag pans, wheel zooms, click selects. Keyboard (after clicking the canvas): W A S D or arrows move, Q and E rotate, R resets. Walk: the mouse looks around, W A S D move, Shift runs, space rises, scroll changes height, click selects what you are looking at, Esc releases the mouse. Touch: one finger orbits or looks, two fingers pinch and pan. Every profile carries an “open in 3D” link that flies straight to that building, and the record panel offers “walk here”.
Context layers: Street Centreline, Hydrology, Parks Sites, Tracks - Non LRT Centre Line, Tracks - LRT Centre Line, Public Trees, Green Line Alignment — The City of Calgary open data, Open Government Licence – City of Calgary. Street widths follow the City’s CTP class, not surveyed pavement; tree canopies are estimated from recorded trunk diameter.
Sponsorship in the city
60 billboard placements exist in the model across three tiers, plus “presented by” placements on building profiles. 57 are available.
Skyline
Rooftop panels on the next twenty-four downtown towers.
See skyline inventory →Street
Pylon signs on the open side of twenty-four mid-rise buildings.
See street inventory →Questions
Scope and limits of the model.
What is the Calgary office city built from?
Every LiDAR roof outline in The City of Calgary 3D Buildings dataset within the record’s coverage (18,089 structures), extruded to its measured roof height, with the 611 assessed office building sites highlighted; the City’s street centrelines (14,127 segments, drawn at right-of-way class widths), hydrology and park polygons, CP rail and CTrain track centrelines, 34,759 public trees, the Plus 15 walkway network at deck level, and CTrain and planned Green Line station markers.
Why do buildings look like flat-topped blocks?
The City’s open 3D layer is a roof-outline model: exterior walls are projected from the roof edge to the ground. Setbacks, spires and mechanical screens are not in the source, so they are not invented. Façade colour and window rhythm follow the building’s construction era on the assessment roll, which is a rendering convention, not a survey of the real façade.
Where does the terrain come from?
The City’s 3D Buildings layer records the lowest ground elevation at the perimeter of every structure. The model interpolates 18,113 of those points into a 30 m heightfield over the downtown box and a 200 m heightfield beyond it, relative to a datum of 1049.5 m above sea level; rivers are lowered two metres below their banks. It is a derived surface, not the City’s digital elevation model, and it smooths over small features.
What does the time slider change?
Sun direction and colour, sky and haze, and how much of the night lighting shows. Windows light up procedurally at dusk in a pattern seeded by each building identifier; it is stable between visits and does not represent real occupancy.
Can I walk the streets?
Yes. Walk puts the camera 1.7 m above the ground; the mouse looks around, W A S D move, Shift runs, space rises and scroll changes height. There is no collision yet, so you can pass through walls. On phones, drag to look and pinch to move.
What are the signs on the rooftops?
Sponsorship placements. A few carry Commercially house messages; the rest are marked available. Sponsorship never changes any figure in the building record.
Public record sources: Current Year Property Assessments (Parcel), Historical Property Assessments (Parcel), Assessment Subproperty Use Codes, 3D Buildings - Citywide (LiDAR roof outlines), Land Use Districts, Transit LRT Stations, Green Line Stations, Plus 15, Historic Resource (Inventory of Evaluated Historic Resources), Development Permits, Building Permits, Calgary Existing Buildings - Performance Metrics (BenchmarkYYC) — The City of Calgary, retrieved 2026-09-21. Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – City of Calgary. Building names, floor counts and architects, where shown, come from Wikidata (CC0). No brokerage, listing-data or commercial research source is used.
Boundary: Assessed values are the City’s assessment-roll figures for taxation and are not sale prices, asking rents, vacancy or availability; Alberta does not publish transaction prices. LiDAR heights are roof-surface elevations above the lowest ground point at the building perimeter and can differ from architectural heights. Storey equivalents are derived at 3.9 m per storey and are not floor counts. Distances are straight-line. Permit descriptions are the City’s records at retrieval and do not establish current use, tenancy or availability. Read the methodology.