GEN Manufacturing

A bookend to Coaldale’s Main Street, the design for GEN Manufacturing serves a much larger  role than mere commercial programming. Backdropped behind the town’s welcome sign, its  image becomes synonymous with place, located prominently along Southern Alberta’s Highway  3. The building, with its recognizable blue roof and formidable corner presence, gives a visual  center to a local urbanism. This centrality, real or imagined, requires the building to become a  regional marker, on top of its base requirement as a local business. The design is a result of this  tension, in which the scale of street and city are both acknowledged in the building massing and  scale of architectural elements.