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.

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.

Sherbourne Common Named one of the Top 10 World Class Landscape Architecture Projects for 2014

Our multi-award winning open space, Sherbourne Common, the iconic waterfront park along Lake Ontario in downtown Toronto, has won yet another prestigious award: it has been named one of the top 10 World Class Landscape Architecture Projects of 2014. PFS Studio is honored to receive this distinction from The Landscape Architects Network (LAN).

Image courtesy of Waterfront Toronto

Here’s what LAN has to say:
Top 10 World Class Landscape Architecture Projects of 2014
Every year, the world becomes home to new, innovative projects in landscape architecture. And every year, the designers behind these projects eagerly await recognition for their hard work. Looking at new technology, public attitudes toward the space, and awards received, the following list is a showcase of some of the best of 2014.

Sherbourne Common, Toronto, Ontario — PFS Studio
As a winner of the 2013 ASLA Honor Award for Design, this space has been around for more than a year. However, it continued to make headlines throughout 2014. Sherbourne Common, a formerly neglected brownfield site on Toronto’s waterfront, combines a storm water treatment facility with landscape, architecture, engineering, and public art to provide an outdoor living room for the new residents of the East Bayfront community.

Click here to read the full article.

Bow River Bridge wins Wood WORKS! BC 2014 Wood Design Award

Photos by StructureCraft Builders Inc.

 

The winners of Wood WORKS! BC 2014 Wood Design Awards have been announced and Banff’s Bow River Bridge has been awarded the Engineer Award.

“Gerald Epp, of Fast + Epp Structural Engineers, known and respected internationally and whose name is synonymous with innovative engineering solutions, was the recipient of the Engineer Award. His project, the Bow River Bridge in Banff, Alberta, is one of the longest timber bridges of its kind. This beautiful structure was carefully designed, given the highly visible and historically significant location, and through design and construction detailing, thoroughly addressed durability and longevity. The Town of Banff desired natural materials for environmental and aesthetic reasons, and timber was the chosen material.” Read more about the awards in Canadian Architect

The bridge was built one year ago, almost to the day. Watch a time lapse video of the bridge’s installation.

PFS Studio’s role in the Bow River Bridge
PFS Studio was part of the successful team to be awarded the Banff Pedestrian Project through a Township led competition process.

Beyond the need to site a landmark structure within the world renowned Banff National Park, PFS Studio was tasked with integrating the existing pedestrian and cyclist pathways that run throughout the town and park with the new crossing points at the proposed bridge, creating a continuous, safe network of walking, cycling, and cross-country ski routes.

The environmental factors involved in successfully locating this new structure were considerable, as the Bow River is a high value riparian environment that is the central feature to the natural setting of the Town of Banff. PFS provided design and construction strategies to address both in-stream and riparian conditions as well as effective integration into the surrounding upland environment. Best management practices established for the Banff National Park for wildlife movement and other environmental objectives were considered as well as the regulations and guidelines of involved regulatory agencies.

Working closely with the Township, the design team was diligent in selecting the appropriate materials and detailing the finishes to complement and enhance the adjacent existing bridge and scenic surroundings.

Sherbourne Common Wins ASLA Honor Award

PFS Studio is thrilled to have won an ASLA award for Toronto’s Sherbourne Common. Sherbourne is one of the first LEED Gold certified parks in Canada. We integrated many sustainable practices into the park design, including an extensive stormwater treatment program.

The conceptual design for Sherbourne Park on the Toronto Waterfront is built upon the abstraction of an iconic Canadian lake and its edge landscape composed of the woods, the water, and the green.

Top + bottom right by PFS Studio
Bottom left by Aristea Rizakos / GrasshopperReps.com

“This is an example of the landscape driving development. You build the public space first and the rest will follow”

“The designer handled different scales to accommodate both children and adults.”

“This is a great project. It has a good feel and will age beautifully.”

—2013 ASLA Professional Awards Jury

Click here for more information.

All over the map

PFS is all over the map! We thought we’d share this fun graphic showing our projects (the pink dots) and our office locations (the blue dots).

We have over 1,500 projects in over a dozen countries worldwide.

The Rebirth of Toronto’s Waterfront: ASLA interviews Greg Smallenberg, FASLA

PFS Studio partner Greg Smallenberg was interviewed by the American Society of Landscape architects on the rebirth of Toronto’s waterfront.

Greg Smallenberg

“The intention from the very beginning is that there wouldn’t be a dividing line between design and disciplines. First and foremost, this is landscape architecture, but it was done in a way that collaborated with artists, architects and engineers. PFS, as a firm, is always trying to do this. Landscape architecture, as a profession, is hopefully trying to do this. You do get mixed results when one discipline takes over or something else happens to skew the balance, but in Sherbourne Common, the balance was there. The engineers were very creative. The architect was very creative. The artist was very creative. PFS set out the concept and the others plugged in all of their resources to making this thing a reality. It’s almost impossible to see where the engineering starts or where the landscape architecture ends because we intentionally wanted boundaries blurred. The same holds for the art and the architecture. So from that perspective, it’s a huge success for us.”

Underpass Park, Toronto
Photo by Doublespace Photography

Read the rest of the interview here for more discussion on urban infrastructure, public space, and the intersection of design disciplines.