The City of Vancouver has recognized 15 winners in a competition to come up with a design for the future of the Georgia and Dunsmuir viaducts and the city’s Eastern Core (Northeast False Creek to Clark Drive.)
The competition included a fee category for design professionals, and a free category for entrants from any background.
In the fee category, winners included Jospeh Fry of Hapa Collaborative for the submission Darn in the Connecting the Core. Fry’s concept proposes to ‘darn’ the holes in the Eastern Core’s street network with three pedestrian-bicycle bridges.
In the Visualizing the Viaducts fee category, award recipients included:
- Dialog, PWL Partnership Landscape Architects, Beasley and Associates, and Green & Associates for Viaducts = Park +, which proposes the removal of the viaducts and a redesign of Pacific and Expo boulevards with enhanced park space, monuments and boulevards;
- Gillian Brennen, Orod Aris, Renante Solivar, Erik Poirier, Sabina Gleeson, Anna Citak, Peter Odegaard and Graham Handford for their entry Periscopes and Projected Landscape – a permanent day and night market to tether the “lost” viaduct space from False Creek to Chinatown, Gastown and Strathcona;
- Tony Osborn for New and Reused, which proposes removing the viaducts and making them into new monuments, with a grotto, filled with water from False Creek and with walls dripping water; and
- Bruce Macdonald for the Ramps, which proposes removing the eastbound Georgia Viaduct to Pacific Boulevard to free up land between an existing park and a part site, as well as parkland east of Main Street, and the removal of a dividing barrier between Chinatown and the end of False Creek.
The City of Vancouver is making no decisions on the viaducts through the competition. However, it hopes the ideas raised will “spark dialogue and help inform and inspire planning” for the areas in question.
According to the city, the viaducts options will feed into the public consultation for the city’s transportation plan update in spring 2012. Planning work to develop policy directions for the Eastern Core will continue in 2012, with a report to council anticipated next summer.
Jenny Wagler
@JennyWagler_BIV