Like the monuments of ancient cities, the viaducts could be disassembled and used to make new monuments. New public spaces, more exciting and mysterious, could take shape where the viaducts stood. A grotto, filled with water from False Creek, is also filled with strange echoes; its walls drip with water, cleansed by a natural landscape and ready to return to the sea.
In the centuries after Rome fell, the stone walls of Roman monuments were selectively dismantled to build monuments to other ideas, other gods, and other ends. As the age of the car wanes, its monuments can also be dismantled to become the building blocks of something better.
The Georgia and Dunsmuir Viaducts have recently proven their usefulness to cyclists and pedestrians in effortlessly crossing Pacific and Expo Boulevards. They also provide a perfectly suitable roof for the skate park below them. Where they serve these purposes, they are retained. Where they don't, they are dismantled.
Not a gram of the demolished viaducts need go to a landfill. Wherever possible, the viaducts can be trimmed even further by removing the concrete I-beams for reuse. The bridge deck and piers can be crushed into pavers and aggregate for new hardscapes.
On the east, an existing earth embankment connects the viaducts to grade. Where the viaducts have been sliced, new vertical connections must be made. This is both an opportunity to reuse the salvaged I-beams, and to create new monuments more inspiring than the structures they replace.
Finally, the ground freed of the viaducts, and opened to the sky, is returned to the natural water cycle with a riparian landscape, and is reclaimed by the public as a place for growing food, building community and seaming this piece of Vancouver back together.
(Competitor's text)
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