The Canadian Society of Landscape Architects (CSLA) announced the recipients of the Awards of Excellence. This year, 13 projects received a national award. These award-winning projects are preeminent examples of Canadian landscape architecture.
Winners were selected by a national jury of landscape architects. A total of 68 submissions were received. Criteria applied by the jurors included:
- demonstration of a deep understanding of the craft of landscape architecture and attention to composition and detail
- demonstration of excellence in leadership, project management, breadth of work, new directions or new technology
- innovation in concept, process, materials or implementation
- promotion of the discipline amongst related professions, clients and the general public
- demonstration of exemplary environmental and/or social awareness
The 2020 National Award Recipients are:
2020 National Award | Research
Exterior Living Wall by Outside! by Planning and Studio Design
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Installed in 2010, this exterior living wall has withstood the test of time and offers a solution to carbon sequestration in urban environments, even in cold climates. Outside! Oversaw the feasibility study, research and development of a unique system to withstand our harsh climate. Learnings offer valuable insight as humanity searches for tools to address urban heat island effect, storm water management, pollution and carbon while bringing beauty and nature back into urban environments.
2020 National Award | Planing and Analysis
Rain City Strategy: A Green Rainwater Infrastructure and Rainwater Management Initiative
by City of Vancouver
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The Rain City Strategy re-imagines and transforms how we manage rainwater in the City of Vancouver with the goals of improving water quality, resilience, and livability through creating healthy urban ecosystems. Developed by a multidisciplinary team of landscape architects, planners, engineers, business planners, accountants, and ecologists, the Rain City Strategy outlines a city-wide plan that will revolutionize how we design public spaces and green infrastructure practices.
2020 National Award | Planning and Analysis
Top of the World Highway Interpretive Plan
by NVision Insight Group with Wendy Shearer, Cultural Heritage Specialist
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The Top of the World Highway is one of the nation’s most spectacular scenic drives connecting Dawson, Yukon and Alaska across the Traditional Territory of the Tr’ondek Hwech’in. The landscape architects developed a culturally-rooted framework for communicating their memories, stories, and traditional practices at significant sites in the landscape. The Interpretive Plan approach demonstrates Reconciliation in practice.
2020 National Award | Planning and Analysis
The Meadoway by Perkins and Will
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Located within the Gatineau Hydro Corridor in Scarborough, Ontario, The Meadoway will transform 16 kilometer of highly maintained monoculture into one of the largest urban, linear greenspaces in Canada. Once complete, it will connect Toronto’s downtown with the Don River Valley and Rouge National Park. It will serve as a blueprint for revitalization, a world-class example of active, linear greenspace, and a precedent for future hydro corridor restoration.
2020 National Award | Medium-Scale Landscapes
Aga Khan Garden
by Thomas Woltz, Owner and Principal, Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects; Member AALA, BCSLA, OALA
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The recently inaugurated Aga Khan Garden, Alberta is at the heart of the University of Alberta’s Botanic Garden. As the world’s northernmost Islamic garden, it interprets the conceptual and physical manifestations of traditional design principles within the context of Alberta’ climate, ecology, and culture.
2020 National Award | Medium-Scale Landscapes
West Eau Claire Park by O2 Planning + Design
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The project for West Eau Claire Park is a reimagining of a highly-valued public space along the Bow River in Calgary that creates new public amenities while weaving critical flood mitigation measures into the fabric of the park. It helps to build a more beautiful, safe, connected, and vibrant city, while strengthening the city’s resilience to changing climates.
Click here to see the other award winners and their projects.
Text & Pictures © CSLA | AAPC via csla-aapc.ca
The International Garden festival, one of the most recognized showcases for contemporary gardens in North America, has announced the designers for its 18th edition. After an international call for proposals, 162 designs from 30 countries were handed in. The jury, consisting of five landscape architects and urban designers, selected six outstanding proposals for the exhibition. The Canadian festival will be presented from June 23, 2017.
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Exhibition on Banks of Saint Lawrence River
The festival is located in Grand-Metis, approximately 300 kilometres northeast of Quebec City, adjacent to the Saint Lawrence River. Next to the pristine site, the well-known gardens from Elsie Reford can be found, which were created between 1926 and 1958. Therefore, the exhibition establishes a link between history and modernity and creates a dialogue between tradition and innovation. Every year about twenty conceptional gardens, developed by more than 70 landscape architects and designers, can be visited.
Interactive Gardens
A common feature of the six selected gardens is their interactivity. Visitors can not only observe trees and plants, they can also hear, feel and even play with the nature. Through facilities and equipment like movable wagons, swings, climbing walls and playgrounds especially children are addressed by the designers. Other exhibitions have a focus on hearing the natural environment, by having bells or large cones installed. Beside the six winning designs, the jury also gave a special mention to two more purposes.
Further information can be found here!
The Place des Festivals in Montréal, Canada provides an unusual sight these days: 13 large illuminated loops have occupied the famous public space. These objects are part of the annual Luminothérapie which is Quebec´s largest competition for temporary public art installations. Most notable feature is the participation of pedestrians, who can play with the loops. The loops are a giant zoetropes, which is an optical toy, that was the ancestor of the animated film. Once activated, flickering images of 13 inspiring fairy tales come to life and can be watched by the participants.
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How does the loop works?
Each loop is two metres in diameter and can be entered by two people, who can activate the installation by pulling levers. A spinning cylinder, with spokes in its running tread, adopt the function of a zoetrope and making a series of still images appear to move. Together with music, the loop creates an animation of fairy tales around the watchers. By changing the tempo at the levers the speed of the moving images and the music can be influenced. The animations are also recognizable from distance and together with video projections on two adjacent buildings, the place is illuminated by flickering lights and images.
The creators
The Luminothérapie is an association of artists, which presents interactive and captivating installations in Montréal every winter. With their work, they want to stimulate creativity in urban design and digital art. Olivier Girouard and Jonathan Villeneuve, the creators of the loops, want to encourage the people’s imagination and participation in public space.
The Port of Vancouver Waterfront Development Master Plan defines a framework for a dynamic mixed-use redevelopment centered around the adaptive re-use of the historic 1923 Terminal 1 Building as a new market square. The original Terminal 1 Building and pier structure constitutes an impressive landmark and a gateway to Washington State along the Columbia River, providing direct access to the City of Vancouver, the downtown City Center and the amenities along the Columbia River.
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In collaboration with the City of Vancouver, the Port of Vancouver has carefully analyzed the market and infrastructure requirements to accommodate a new waterfront development that engages and excites visitors and residents alike; considering appropriate land uses, infrastructure and transportation needs to create a major attraction along the Columbia River waterfront. The Master Plan utilized an objective analysis and an informed consensus-driven process among Port Commissioners, the City and interested community members to create a shared vision of the waterfront development. Additionally, the Master Plan aims at promoting wise sustainability measures and economic development goals, as well as access and mobility facilities for all users to create a high quality standard for the Port waterfront and the City of Vancouver.
Phase II of the Waterfront Development Master Plan encompasses the Conceptual Development Plan and entitlements, including preliminary engineering design of the overwater structure, urban design guidelines and sustainable development strategies focusing on recognizing the port’s long-standing maritime heritage and culture as a key placemaking strategy. A key element for the project’s success will be the development and programming of several public plazas and a series of pedestrian alleyways that connect each use within the site, as well as links to the downtown core and the adjacent waterfront development.
A new way of finding the path
NBBJ’s approach to design the Port of Vancouver wayfinding system resulted from a workshop with clients to uncover ideas for the Port of Vancouver waterfront site. The atmosphere of the new waterfront is social and casual while including the history of the place.
Impressive pier-like reclaimed lumber sculptural signs were designed as large landmark identifiers, defining the waterfront district boundary as well as providing orientation to visitors. Each sign is a different combination of long-distance mark, art, history, other information, and/or directory depending on the location.
The effective wayfinding system is both intuitive and easy to remember. Traditional wayfinding is purely informational (i.e. street signs and indicators) whereas the proposed wayfinding system is landmark-based. Creating impressive hubss by which people can navigate through the space allow new visitors to quickly go from point A to point B and back without any confusion. Landmarks can include public art, murals, quirky signs, or sculptures. Incorporating directional information into these landmarks helps to create a holistic and memorable wayfinding system. Research in neuroanthropology supports landmark-based wayfinding as a more intuitive and effective way for people to navigate in an urban space.
From 1926 to 1958 Elsie Reford, gardener and plant collector, created Les jardins de Métis / Reford Gardens on the shores of the St. Lawrence and Mitis rivers in Quebec, Canada. The gardens and heritage buildings were designated by the government of Quebec in 2013. But even before then, since 2000, the site has served as a location for the Métis International Garden Festival. With her new publication “Experimenting Landscapes: Testing the Limits of the Garden“, the author Emily Waugh honors site and festival projects.
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For sixteen years the Métis International Garden Festival in Quebec, Canada has attracted more than one million visitors. Since 2000 more than 150 temporary gardens at the cutting edge of garden design and environmental art have been presented. Famous designers such as Diana Balmori, Claude Cormier, Ken Smith, Snøhetta and Topotek 1 experimented with materials, methods, and design concepts. Now, between the 17th and 18th edition of the festival, the new publication “Experimenting Landscapes: Testing the Limits of the Garden“ presents a selection of 25 projects as well as essays by landscape critic Tim Richardson, landscape architect Marc Hallé and comments by festival designers that explore how the garden can challenge our assumptions, provide new meanings, and change how we perceive even the most familiar things.
Architect Jean Verville wins coveted Montreal Museum of Fine Arts’ invited competition for the development of Museum Avenue. During summer 2016, his elegant installation Dance Floor offers a lively landscape animated by an exuberant trompe-l’oeil. With Verville’s proposal the participants experiment movement, both free and structured by the course, to surrender to the pleasure of an impulsive action or casual wandering. Welcoming varied and unforgettable performances, Dance Floor shines a new dynamism to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts’ area.
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With paving made of more than 5,000 footprints, Dance Floor installation composed a stunning mosaic reminiscent of hammered gold, nod to the theme of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts’ exhibition Pompeii. The gesture, of an equally unexpected as sensational simplicity, traces some chaos proper to crowd and invite passersby to improvise steps on this huge dancing floor. Shaping a new urban intersection, architect Jean Verville transforms the pedestrian street into a giant interactive activity enlivening downtown Montreal with formidable improvised dances, while encouraging the visitor to build its customized tour within the works of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts’ Sculpture Garden.
The architect
The practice of Jean Verville is on the fringe of mainstream architecture. For each proposal, architecture, design, museum installation or object, the architect uses the architectural promenade as material to develop the spatial qualities of his experiments. In addition to its award-winning practice and his significant international publications Jean Verville continues his investigations on architectural design process through a PhD at Université du Québec à Montréal.
Client: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
Typology: Urban installation
Location: Montreal, Canada
Superficy: 3.000 square feet
Year of conception: 2015
Year of construction: 2016
