Early on in the development of St. Patrick’s Island Park just beyond downtown Calgary, community members told its designers at W Architecture and Landscape Architecture and Civitas that they wanted a park that was both wild and accessible, a place to play and learn. This short video by Civitas offers commentary from Barbara Wilks, FASLA, and Mark Johnson, FASLA, and gives viewers a first-person view of what this naturalistic sense of experimentation looks and feels like, with requisite drone shots and GoPro-enabled immersion. Designed to flood, and surrounded on all sides by the Bow River, the park has permeable borders that let in the water and city life beyond.
Posts Tagged ‘Bow River’
NO PLAN IS AN ISLAND
Posted in CITIES, ECOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT, FEATURES, HABITAT, PARKS, PLANNING, PLANTS, PRESERVATION, REAL ESTATE, RESIDENTIAL, RESILIENCE, RIVER RESTORATION, SOIL, SPECIES, THE CLIENT, WATER, WILDLIFE, tagged Aboriginal, Alberta, anglers, Barbara Wilks, beavers, benches, Blackfoot Confederacy, Boardwalk, Bow River, breach, Brian Barth, bridge, Calgary, Calgary Drop-In Centre, Calgary Municipal Land Corporation, Canada, Canadian prairie, Civitas, Clare LePan, community revitalization levy, concrete, Cottonwoods, development, Diana Krecsy, displacement, East Village, erosion control, fire truck access road, flooding, food trucks, gallery forest, gentrification, great horned owl, habitat, homeless, housing, Huckleberry Finn, Hula-Hoop, Julian B. Lane Riverfront Park, kayakers, lamppost, landscape architect, Landscape Architecture, landscape design, maintenance, Makhabn, Mark Johnson, Michael Brown, National Post, natives, osprey, Park, pavilion, Philadelphia, playground, plaza, Race Street Pier, rafters, recreation, RESILIENCE, riparian woodland, riprap, river birch, river channels, Rocky Mountain, sculpture, shrubs, spring melt season, St. Patrick's Island, Tampa, tax increment financing, urban explorers, W Architecture and Landscape Architecture, wetland, wildflower, willow on January 14, 2020| 2 Comments »
BY BRIAN BARTH
A flood-friendly park re-creates a resilient landscape in Calgary’s Bow River.
FROM THE JANUARY 2020 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.
In the summer of 2013, catastrophic flooding in southern Alberta killed five people and forced 100,000 to evacuate. With $6 billion in property damage, it was one of the costliest natural disasters in Canadian history. The swollen Bow River, which flows from glacial headwaters in the Rockies to Calgary, left much of the city’s urban core underwater. The inundated area included St. Patrick’s Island, one of several islands in the downtown stretch of the river, where Barbara Wilks, FASLA, and Mark Johnson, FASLA, had just kicked off construction on a new 31-acre park. A new pedestrian bridge to the island, which was partially built at the time, suffered significant damage. But for the park itself, Wilks and Johnson—the founders of W Architecture and Landscape Architecture and Civitas, respectively—say the floodwaters provided positive reinforcement of their design.
This was not the initial reaction, however, of the folks at the Calgary Municipal Land Corporation (CMLC), their client.
“Our client called and said, ‘Oh, God, you have to get up here; we’re going to have to change the design,’” said Johnson as he, Wilks, and I strolled across the bridge to the completed park on a clear spring day.
“The whole island flooded!’” Wilks recalled members of the CMLC team saying in an urgent and distressed call. “We said, ‘It’s going to be fine; there’s nothing to change. We designed it to flood—this is what’s supposed to happen.’” (more…)
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