Editor’s note: David Murray is an architect in Edmonton and met Arni Fullerton in 1981 while working for him on an alternate, traditional plan for the development of a new town at 58˚ N as required by his contract with the province, led by Montreal architect Ray Affleck. Fullerton and his wife Merle were interviewed on Zoom in April 2024 at their home in Nanaimo.
All images courtesy of the Arni Fullerton Collection at the Provincial Archives of Alberta, unless otherwise noted.
Written by: David Murray, Architect AAA, FRAIC
In the late 1970s, the Alberta Government’s Department of Housing and Public Works, initiated a planning process with the intent to design a new community in northern Alberta, north of Fort McMurray, specifically to house workers and their families at the expanding oil sands extraction developments. It would be a most imaginative and provocative approach to living in the north, the culmination of a lot of precedent research by a team of planning and engineering visionaries.
Architect Arni Fullerton was hired by the Alberta government to design the proposed new town. His vision, on which he collaborated with Britain’s Buro Happold Engineers and German structural engineer Frei Otto, was a 35 acre air-supported, weather-controlled, transparent dome, covering a town centre that incorporated housing, recreation fields, a sports complex, commercial properties, a shopping centre, schools, an amphitheatre, parks and a children’s plaza. The town was intended to grow incrementally, outside the town centre dome, over time. All parts of the town would be connected by public transit.
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