Virtual Reality Tour of Underpass Park

The ASLA has put together an incredible virtual reality tour, guided by Greg Smallenberg, of Toronto’s award winning Underpass Park.

ASLA selected Underpass Park because it won the ASLA 2016 Professional Award of Excellence. Less than 1 percent of all award submissions receive this honor. This virtual reality tour was featured at the recent ASLA Annual Meeting and EXPO in New Orleans.

Virtual Reality is an emerging tool for Landscape Architecture. It allows people to “visit” a space that they may otherwise never have a chance to experience. It allows people to experience the value of landscape architecture without having to go anywhere.

You can view the video on your phone or desktop computer, without needing to have the virtual reality headset.

Viewing Options

Option 1: Watch a 360 Video on YouTube

If you are on your phone reading this page, simply click on this URL and watch it in your YouTube mobile app: https://youtu.be/IUr2g5rabaU (please note that this video will not work on your mobile browser)

Be sure to turn around while watching so you can see all angles of the park!

Or if you are on a desktop computer, go to https://youtu.be/IUr2g5rabaU using your Chrome browser. Use the sphere icon to navigate through the park!

Option 2: Watch a 3D 360 Video on Samsung Gear VR

If you own a Samsung Gear VR headset and compatible Samsung phone, go to Samsung Gear via the Oculus App and search for “Underpass Park” or “ASLA” to find our video.

Video Credits
Producer: American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA)
Production Company: DimensionGate, Toronto
Director: Ian Tuason
Director of Photography: Jon Riera
Narrator: Greg Smallenberg, FASLA, principal, PFS Studio
Camera Assistant: Mark Valino
Post Production: Connor Illsley
Skateboarders: Cris Fonseca and Dan Everson

Photo by Tom Arban

PFS at the Smithsonian

Greg Smallenberg + Chris Phillips arriving at the opening reception

PFS Principals Greg Smallenberg, Chris Phillips, Kelty McKinnon, Jeffrey Staates and Jennifer Nagai attended last nights opening reception “By the People: Designing a Better America” at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City.

The exhibition features PFS Studio’s award winning Underpass Park as one of 60 socially responsible design projects from Canada, the United States and Mexico.

The exhibition opens to the public today and runs through to February 26th, 2017.

Jeffrey Staates + Greg Smallenberg in front of the Underpass Park display

 

Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
2 East 91st Street
New York, NY

Hours: Sunday through Friday, 10 am to 6 pm, and Saturday, 10 am to 9 pm

Architizer A+ Award for Telus Garden

Vancouver’s Telus Garden has won both the Popluar Choice and the Jury Award in the category of Office – High-Rise (16+ Floors), in this years Architizer A+Awards.

The Architizer A+Awards celebrates the year’s best architecture and products. Its mission is to nurture the appreciation of meaningful architecture in the world and champion its potential for a positive impact on everyday life.

PFS Studio worked with Henriquez Partners Architects on this development that “radically transformed an aging block of downtown Vancouver into a future friendly community that fuses beauty, functionality and environmental stewardship.”

Click here for more about Telus Garden, and here to see the other award winners.

 

Photos by Ed White.

MOV: Talk and Tour with Kelty McKinnon

Partner, Kelty McKinnon, PFS Studio, along with Joe Frye of Hapa Collaborative and Derek Lee of PWL Partnership, will discuss the process of city building, at the Museum of Vancouver, on Thursday, May 5 at 7pm.

The presentation, “Public Realm Design Essentials: Program, Process, Price”, will cover the true necessities to building public space in the current climate, and how design professionals can assist the public to understand its value.

Kelty, Joe and Derek, will focus on what they see as three vital issues in the design of the contemporary public realm: program, process and price.

For tickets and information, please click here.

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PFS Studio goes to the Smithsonian

PFS Studio is honoured to have been selected to exhibit one of our projects – Underpass Park – at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City.

“By the People: Designing a Better America” is the third exhibition in its series on socially responsible design. The exhibition will explore the challenges faced by urban, suburban and rural communities in the U.S. and its bordering countries.

Cooper Hewitt’s curator of socially responsible design, Cynthia E. Smith, conducted more than two years of field research in order to select 60 design projects from every region across the U.S., as well as Canada and Mexico.

The exhibition will run from September 30th, 2016 through to February 26th, 2017.

Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
2 East 91st Street
New York, NY

Hours: Sunday through Friday, 10 am to 6 pm, and Saturday, 10 am to 9 pm

Please click here for more information.

Photos by Tom Arban

The Raising of UBC’s Musqueam Pole

A magnificent Musqueam post was raised and dedicated at UBC this week, completing PFS’s award-winning University Boulevard stormwater feature landscape. The post, carved by Musqueam artist Brent Sparrow Jr., welcomes visitors to the University campus on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded Musqueam land and speaks to the special relationship between UBC and the Musqueam people. PFS’s Chris Phillips and Mike Derksen were present at the celebration.

Click here for more information and  here to watch the instillation of the pole.

 

 

 

Barge Park

PFS Studio is currently participating in an exciting exhibition at the Museum of Vancouver. The exhibition, Your Future Home: Creating the New Vancouver, explores some of the hottest topics currently facing Vancouverites: housing affordability, urban density, mobility, and public space.

The Vancouver Urbanarium Society and the Museum of Vancouver invited Architects, Designers and Planners to develop a concept and build an installation which would illustrated possible ways that housing, density, mobility and public space could be addressed in the future.

For the exhibition, the PFS team proposed a system of floating public parks on barges that could be moved around the waters surrounding Vancouver, or even travel to different coastal cities around the world. Nine ways to adapt a barge to public open space uses are illustrated and participants can combine them by rotating the display panels.

You can read more about the exhibition here.

Barge Park System

Vancouver has long-lamented its lack of a central, unifying urban square. It is critiqued for its enchantment with its perimeter, its beaches, ocean and views beyond. Our proposal embraces this condition as inherent to Vancouver, what makes it unique.

Vancouver is a coastal city, embedded in lush forests, mountains and ocean. In its history of settlement, which spans millennia, the shoreline, bays and water have always been social- a space accommodating grand ceremony as well as everyday gatherings. If we look at the flows that pass through our waterways, this space is absolutely urban in nature. Cruise ships, paddle boards, seabusses, watertaxis, sailboats, kayaks, barges and various other vessels criss cross and linger. A new floating park system of barges,that can be composed into variously scaled park networks is proposed. Collectively able to form a large, multifunctional civic park, as well as able to disband to diverse locations and neighbourhoods, a series of variously programmed barges would embrace the view, and raise questions of land use, access, and relationships between what is urban and what is nature: pastoral park, floating forest, botanical gardens, kayak in- movie theatre, floating swimming pools, sculpture and art garden, fishing park and Aqua farming, community gardens and orchards, recreational fields, camp ground, concert grounds, amusement park, adventure play grounds, etc.

As other cities catch wind of the success of these park barges, they will also begin to create their own floating parks. These parks could rotate internationally, expanding our sense of cosmopolitan social space with park barges from Korea, Africa, Europe and other international destinations.

Edmonton Urban Design Awards

Chris Phillips was recently in Edmonton to jury the Edmonton Urban Design Awards alongside Eduardo Aquino (Professor of Architecture at the University of Manitoba), Anne Cormier (Professor of Architecture at the University of Montreal), Gordon Price and Betsy Williamson. Awards will be handed out in the following categories: Implemented Urban Design Plans, Urban Architecture, Civic Design Projects, Urban Fragments, Community Improvement Projects, Student Projects as well as two new categories: Heritage Projects and Infill Development.

There were many outstanding submissions, in particular several student projects and many City of Edmonton new park buildings.

The City has demonstrated a high design standard for its own projects.

You can vote for the People’s Choice Award until November 23rd by clicking here.

Hastings Park – Plateau Sports Park

The latest addition to Vancouver’s Hastings Park is open to the public.

The grand opening of Empire Fields and Plateau Sports Park saw huge crowds braving the hot sun to experience all that this new section of Hastings Park has to offer. Empire Fields consists of two playing fields surrounded by a rubberized  running track. Looking down onto the fields is the Plateau Sports Park which has everything an active person of any age could hope for. There are beach volleyball courts, basketball courts, ping pong tables, Canada’s first parkour park, an outdoor fitness area, a children’s playground and a BMX bike track.

Read more about the new park and the opening day celebrations here.

Empire Fields and Plateau Sports Park is just the latest in PFS Studio’s 30 year history with Hastings Park, which has included Master Plans and a handful of key pieces such as the Sanctuary and the Italian Rain Gardens.

Dialogues on Urbanization: Emerging Landscapes

PFS Studio has been asked to present Toronto’s Sherbourne Common at Dialogues on Urbanization: Emerging Landscapes, a prestigious international exhibition at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. The exhibition examines landscape architecture in the age of planetary urbanization.

Sherbourne Common has been paired with a work by Parallax Landscape in the category Leveraging Regional Resources. Our display focused on Sherbourne Common as both major civic amenity and poetic stormwater treatment infrastructure for the East Bayfront precinct.

Sherbourne Common: Water is celebrated in all of its forms by highlighting tactile, visual and acoustic effects

About the Exibition
Over the past decade, the design disciplines have increasingly adapted their research and design methods in response to the complexity and speed of urbanization in the 21st century. “Dialogues on Urbanization: Emerging Landscapes” takes stock of recent disciplinary developments in research methods, design strategies, and representational modes in landscape architecture and urbanism through pairing eleven speculative and eleven built projects. Diverse in geography and content, each pair addresses a common issue stemming from 21st-century processes of urbanization. From flood mitigation strategies in Seoul to freight-based settlements in the Illinois Fox River Valley, “Dialogues on Urbanization” underscores landscape architecture’s considerable contribution towards reimagining urban systems such as mobility networks, agricultural production, and waste flows, at multiple scales, from the planetary to the hyper-local.

Dialogues on Urbanization: Emerging Landscapes opened on March 23rd, 2015.