The Guardian North Tower
The Guardian North Tower stands at 1122 3 Street SE, on the Victoria Park side of the Beltline, north of Stampede Park. It reaches 147 metres over 44 storeys and completed in 2016. Hon Towers developed the complex. IBI Group Architects designed it and Glotman Simpson engineered the structure.
The building
Both towers are reinforced concrete, clad in glass window walls and metal panels. The floor plates extend past the glass line, which shades the homes underneath them, and the structural engineers credit that move with improving the building's energy performance. It is the kind of decision that shows up as the silhouette of the building from three kilometres away and as a cooling load on a spreadsheet, and it was made for the second reason.
The city height register lists the North and South towers as the joint tallest buildings in the Beltline. The engineers describe the complex as the highest residential development in Calgary.
The Guardian’s amenity set covers both towers. It runs to a fitness centre, a yoga studio, a workshop, and an owner’s lounge with a kitchen and games. A garden terrace on the seventh level carries barbecues and fire tables, and concierge and security cover the complex 24 hours a day.
Parking is titled and heated, with visitor stalls on site and direct elevator access to the parkade. Each home comes with an assigned storage locker, and the building holds secured bicycle storage.
Victoria Park around it
Victoria Park was its own community from 1914 until the Beltline absorbed it in 2003. The Guardian adjoins Arriva, and between them the two projects carry the residential height on this side of the district. Victoria Park and Stampede station sits close by on the Red Line, opened in 1981 and rebuilt in 2024 as part of the works around the grounds.
The BMO Centre expansion opened at Stampede Park in June 2024, the largest convention facility in western Canada and the anchor of the Culture + Entertainment District taking shape across east Victoria Park. Stampede Park runs more than a thousand events a year beyond the ten days of the Calgary Stampede each July, and the Saddledome has stood on the grounds since 1983. Seventeenth Avenue SW is south, and Central Memorial Park with its 1912 library lies west along 12 Avenue.
We wrote about the community around it. Living in Beltline.
