18,099 LiDAR structures and 612 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.
Colour and light encode the record; nothing is styled by hand.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The model is a working instrument, not only a view.
Recolour every assessed office site by roof height, assessed value, year built, Plus 15 access, walk to CTrain, heritage status or permit activity, with a legend. Use it to frame a submarket in one picture.
Open coloured by assessed value →Add candidate buildings from their record panels, fly through them in order, compare heights, floors, footprints, assessments, transit and Plus 15 side by side, and copy a tour link a client can replay.
Try a one-building tour →Stand inside any floor of a selected building with its walls hidden and see what a tenant would see. Floor heights are derived from the measured roof height and the floor count.
Select the tallest tower →Click two points for a straight-line distance and walking time, then download the current frame as a PNG with a caption for a proposal or deck.
Open the model →60 billboard placements exist in the model across three tiers, plus “presented by” placements on building profiles. 57 are available.
Rooftop panels on the twelve tallest office roofs, 159.8 m and up.
See crown inventory →Rooftop panels on the next twenty-four downtown towers.
See skyline inventory →Pylon signs on the open side of twenty-four mid-rise buildings.
See street inventory →Scope and limits of the model.
Every LiDAR roof outline in The City of Calgary 3D Buildings dataset within the record’s coverage (18,099 structures), extruded to its measured roof height, with the 612 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.
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.
The City’s 3D Buildings layer records the lowest ground elevation at the perimeter of every structure. The model interpolates 18,123 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.
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.
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. Building footprints block the way until you rise above the roof. On phones, drag to look and pinch to move.
Each view recolours the assessed office sites from one field of the record and dims everything else: roof height bands, assessed value bands from the current roll, year built, Plus 15 status, straight-line distance to the nearest CTrain platform, heritage and named buildings, the count of development and building permits since 2012, or the number of City business licences on the parcel. The legend under the toolbar states the bands. Context structures without an office assessment stay grey.
Click “Add to shortlist” on any record panel to collect buildings. Tour flies through them in order, Compare lays their record side by side, and “Copy tour link” produces a URL that replays the same shortlist, time of day and colour view for a client. The shortlist is kept in this browser only; nothing is sent to a server.
It places the camera inside the chosen floor of the selected building, hides that building’s own walls, and lets you turn and walk to the window line. Floor height is the measured roof height divided by the floor count (Wikidata where recorded, otherwise the derived storey-equivalent at 3.9 m per storey), so it is an approximation of the view, not a survey of any suite.
Turn Measure on and click two points on the ground or on buildings. The model reports the horizontal straight-line distance and a walking time at 80 m per minute; real routes along streets and the Plus 15 are longer.
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), Calgary Business Licenses, On-Street Parking Zones with Rates, Building Inspections Results — The City of Calgary, retrieved 2026-09-22. 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.