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

ASLA Win for Underpass Park

Photo by Tom Arban

PFS Studio is honoured to announce that Toronto’s Underpass Park is the recipient of the American Society of Landscape Architect’s prestigious Award of Excellence, the highest honour given in the General Design category.

Selected from 459 entries, the ASLA awards honor top public, commercial, residential, institutional, planning, communications and research projects in the U.S. and around the world.

Click here for the ASLA’s announcement and complete list of award recipients.

The September issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine (LAM) features the winning projects and is available online for free viewing here.

Top Left and Bottom Photos by Tom Arban  | Top Right Photo by Natta Summerky

About Underpass Park

Underpass Park is a unique public space located under and around the Richmond and Adelaide overpasses in downtown east Toronto, this new park transformed a derelict and underused space into a functional and engaging urban neighbourhood amenity, reconnecting new and preexisting neighbourhoods in a dynamic and flexible manner. What was once a “no man’s land” now provides recreational facilities, public art, gathering places and a venue for community events. Residents of the new West Don Lands community, particularly those in the north-eastern section of the community, are now actively connected with new neighbourhoods to the south and with the new commercial heart along Front Street East, also designed by PFS Studio.

Approximately 50% of the park is covered by transportation infrastructure. The design takes full advantage of this weather protection and has incorporated recreational spaces including a skate board park, basketball courts and play structures for all ages. The park also provides a flexible community space that can be used for markets, festivals, food trucks and moveable cafes. In the open areas of the park, dense groves of trees and robust perennial grasses bring much needed green space to the area and create a natural and iconic pedestrian gateway to this area of the West Don Lands.

PFS Studio was strongly supported by The Planning Partnership as well as Paul Raff Studio, who created the park’s public art piece, ‘Mirage’.

Urban Design Award for Telus Garden

A City of Vancouver Urban Design Award was presented to Telus Garden in the category of Urban Elements.

Projects are chosen for their contribution to the overall experience of design in the city. The jury carefully considers the design of public spaces and how buildings interact with these spaces.

PFS Studio was responsible for the public plaza, alley and terrace designs for this Leed Platinum project.

You can read more about the awards here.

Photo by Ed White Photographics.

 

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

Another win for Lansdowne Park

PFS Studio is honoured to have won a RAIC (Royal Architecture Institute of Canada) National Urban Design Award, Certificate of Merit in the category of Civic Design Projects for Lansdowne Park in Ottawa.

The awards are part of a two-tier program held in cooperation with Canadian municipalities. The National Urban Design Awards program judged winners of the 2015 municipal awards and entries submitted at large. Click here to read more about the awards and the other winning projects.

PFS Studio has also won the Ottawa Urban Design Award of Excellence – Visions & Master Plans and the 2016 CSLA Jury’s Award of Excellence and National Award for our work at Lansdowne Park.

Jeffrey Staates and Greg Smallenberg will be on hand to receive this latest award at the RAIC’s Fesitval of Architecture in Nanaimo this June.

Photos courtesy of Jill Anholt, City of Ottawa and Haewon Chun

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.

 

 

 

Two CSLA wins for PFS Studio

Today, the Canadian Society of Landscape Architects (CSLA) announced the recipients of the
National Awards of Excellence. This year, 11 projects received a national award and one project, PFS Studio’s Lansdowne Park in Ottawa, was selected for the Jury’s Award of Excellence. This award is given to one project per year which best demonstrates the CSLA’s vision (advancing the art, science and practice of landscape architecture).

Lansdowne Park, Ottawa Photos by Haewon Chun | Aerial photo courtesy of the City of Ottawa

 

A National Award of Excellence was also bestowed on Toronto’s West Don Lands designed by PFS Studio with the Planning Partnership.

West Don Lands Photo by Tom Arban

 

These award-winning projects are preeminent examples of Canadian landscape architecture. They illustrate the range of what landscape architects do and how landscape architects are helping to reshape our communities – defining the places we want to live, work and play.

Winners were selected by a national jury of landscape architects. The principal criteria applied by the jurors were:

• 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 recipient of the 2016 Jury’s Award of Excellence and a National Award is:

Lansdowne Park
PFS Studio
Category: Public Landscapes Designed by a Landscape Architect

And among the 10 recipients of the 2016 National Award is:

The West Don Lands
The Planning Partnership and PFS Studio
Category: Public Landscapes Designed by a Landscape Architect

You can read more about the awards here.

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.

Award of Excellence for Lansdowne Park

Ottawa’s recently completed Lansdowne Park was the recipient of this year’s Ottawa Urban Design Award for Excellence for Visions and Masterplans.

The jury cited Lansdowne Park as “an excellent example of revitalizing development that balances social, cultural, environmental and economic sustainability. It fulfills the concept of ‘mixed use’ in the truest meaning of the phrase; a vibrant blend of residential, retail/commercial, recreation/entertainment, civic and green space program. A high quality pedestrian-first public realm is evident throughout; and built form scale and transition is particularly successful.”

You can read more about the park, the award, and the other recipients here and here.

Photos courtesy of Haewon Chun, City of Ottawa and D. Barbour