Borden Park has a colourful history as a very popular public space of many attractions which have evolved over time. The new pavilion has been specifically configured to suggest resilience - designing a capacity for the new public building that will allow it to continue to evolve within a constant current of change. Its romantic curving pathways creating picturesque landscapes and oval green 'rooms' has suggested a built form for the pavilion that can both embrace evolving public preferences and addresses a larger assembly of open spaces. A branching configuration of three components - built programme, open trellis, and bosque - occupy the prescribed site while stretching out to active and reactivate the spaces and pathways that are adjacent to it. While paying respect to the original park programme of leisurely promenades, the composition of these elements also reflects the new more active components of the park of recreational sports.
Assemblies of trees are suggested to support the partial structuring of the new pavilion to create a complementary new connection to the parking lot, and a double sidewalk is reinstated and strengthened as a linkage to the park at its urban edge. The parking lot boundary is similarly reinforced with trees, with a new winding pathway connecting to the parking area creating an improved organization around the landscape terraces.
The program elements are accommodated in an L-shaped pavilion which is connected by a raised surface that branches to connect to a new open trellis and branching again to a raised plantation of trees. This connecting surface is proposed as a space in itself. More than a pathway, this surface is thickened and works as a plateau for an event space, adjacent to the programs and uses of the pavilion.
Within the built pavilion, the community room is visible and approachable from all directions. The south-east façade can open completely onto a patio to increase the seating areas on beautiful days and to perceptually invite the space of the park garden to flow into the space of the public room. The concession is linked both to the patio and to the community room. The washroom elements are allocated on the north end of the pavilion and accessed from the walkway.
The built element is wrapped in a golden screen composed of folding and pivoted surfaces made of composite large wood panels and glazed areas. Seams of light cross through the screens to the interior of the built form, while evening illumination send seams of light into the park. These screens form both walls of the community room and washrooms and free-standing elements that further extend the idea of 'middle space' in a compressed edge of the building that is then a connective linkage to the new outdoor rooms formed by the raised surface, trellis and boss.
The trellis, linked by the raised walking surface, links the inner gardens across the walkway to the lager park open space, to strengthen the recognition and identity of the new pavilion within the legibility of the large park. The trellis is envisioned with flowering vines and as a place for impromptu happenings, a romantic place for music on a summer evening, or as a lights festival or New Year's Eve party in the winter holiday season.
The spaces created between the built elements, the trellis and the small boss are intended to be used for both special events - strongly supported programmatically by the concession and community room on one side, and the trellis on the other - and also for a 'middle space' that creates a new addition to the vocabulary of open spaces in Borden Park - a transition between the shaded 'verandah' moving into the washroom and community room to the discreetly enfolded outdoor room leading further to the second 'enclosure' of space between the trellis and boss. These two outdoor rooms become an important part of the public resilience of the park programming - making casual and special programming in comfortable and normalized spaces.
Tree lilacs could provide spring colour and shade in the summer across the front of the building. The garden space could be strengthened with additional plantings west of the washroom entrance along the pathway. The area behind the plantings could function as a utility space for the concession. The addition of more picnic tables and barbecue pits in this area of the park would support the addition of the new family event spaces provided within the overall structure of the pavilion.
The essence of the Borden Park pavilion is to add to the unique history of this important Edmonton landmark as an open structure of interconnection that gives equal prominence to landscape and built form, the ambiguity of being inside and outside, and creating a field of spaces for public appropriation.
(From competitor's text)
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