The park engages the vibrant street life of College Street with dynamic sculpture to draw you in and celebrate this vibrant artistic neighbourhood. Back drop art screens hold the space to provide human scale and celebrate neighbourhood culture, architecture and history.
The area is alive with independent theatre and the raised stage allows of impromptu performance. The ground place has a rhythmic and colourful grid pattern interspersed with blocks of planting to green up the space and provide seasonal colour. Upright columnar trees punctuate up through the grid and accentuate the overall ground plane while adding vertical interest. Benches placed with in the grid amongst planting and trees make this a wonderful place for social interaction or solo relaxation. This vibrant multi use park with environmental features such as on site water use treatment makes this site a true landmark space for the for the neighbourhood and city core alike.
(Competitor's text)
This design lowers the bunker wall to bench height and re‐plants it with shrubs and other low‐level greenery. Pavement is a checkerboard of different materials, dotted with numerous trees that are unprotected by curbs. It is also sloped, eastwards, to direct rain water through the plant beds to be collected in a drum which forms the core of a circular stage at the top of the steps from the west end of KHC which is a landmark of this design. Other landmarks are the sculptures which stretch N‐S along the outer edge of the trench behind the wall ‐ which may have been widened to allow this installation as well as patio furniture which is put out by the non‐medical businesses that have set up in the now accessible west end of KHC. Large display boards, which might serve as a neighbourhood art gallery, are lined up on the outside of the lowered bunker wall. This is an attractive idea but it does pose problems: reducing light to the plantings in the bunker wall, providing hiding places, creating possible targets for vandalism. Benches (with tables) are interesting: wood panels at bench and table height, sandwiched between panels of rigid steel matting. (I wonder if these are more uncomfortable than they need to be, to prevent sleeping, and how vandal‐resistant they might be. Other, more comfortable looking, benchtable designs are shown in the panel "Metal Grates and Site Furnishing". Re the former, a variety of interesting designs are shown, all of which might be considered, along with the sloped grate covers proposed in #4, The Brunswick Bend and #8, Flow Plantings also look vulnerable as well as demanding re maintenance‐ to trampling and trapping garbage.
(Excerpt from the jury's comments)
