The defining role of the new pavilion for Mill Woods Sports Park is to make a branched structure that provides both excellent facilities while creating a series of 'outdoor rooms' that extend the convergence of paths -not to a single point, but to a tableau of interconnected courtyards, bosques, terraces, verandahs and trellises. This composition of landscape and built form of the pavilion crea tes a new middle space where the distinct groups of leagues -of team players, parents, friends, accidentai spectators -can ail find a natural place within the vastness of Mill Woods Park to come together casually or to come together specifically for major events. The generous space of Mill Woods Park becomes discreetly defined within the outreach of the new pavilion to make these spaces for the everyday and for the special event.
The best strategie form of the pavilion is one that uses its volume to create bonus space -the 'plus' of nested and linked outdoor rooms of courtyards, bosques, and forecourts together with generous programme frontages and carefully considered entrances into the multi-use arrangement of change rooms, locker rooms, offices and common rooms. Singly, these programme elements are composed efficiently with safety, accessibility, maintenance and fluid circulation in mind, with discrete entrance areas that are nevertheless highly visible from ail areas of the park. Brought together, these built elements combine with landscape elements of raised green tableaus, allees and groves to create branch structures that create moments of convergence and of broader definitions of both built and unbuilt spaces, ail imagined in a perpendicular relationship to the major pedestrian route of the Park.
The central piece of this pavilion is the interconnected community room and concession, surrounded by covered patios that open onto a courtyard formed by washrooms and locker rooms. These covered patios have been sized to be large enough for several teams to gather for the post game socializing or as a place to find shelter during sudden rain showers. The southern patio is seen as a warm gathering space for spring and fal!, and, in the winter, a sun trap for warming up and for informai dog walkers' daily gatherings. In the summer, the north patio is a cooler place to hang out.
Coaches can use the patios for meetings and planning with players and parents. There are suggested territories that different groups can appropriate, but there is a flow that permits mingling and keeps the spaces from feeling exclusive for any one group. Multiple meetings can happen simultaneously. For events needing electronic equipment, a command central can be set up under coyer. Storage zones have been arranged conveniently for team use in ways that also allow for reduced heating costs where seasonal use is anticipated.
The courtyard is envisioned as a gathering space for larger events. Formed by change room wings on the south and west and the storage and office wings on the east, it is open and framed with a colonnade of flowering crab apples on the north. A firepit or large barbecue is at the heart of the space. It would be a place where participants could gather for ail pre and post game activities. A marquee could be used to expand the covered spa ce. Additional power for sound systems and potable water hookups would be provided on the exterior south wall of the change room wing.
The front of the pavilion has a lapping series of metal and translucent screens that create a verandah-like frieze running its entire length, designed to establish effects of light and open-ness. This frieze has an upper row of fixed louvers with a base of moving screen doors, making up a rich colour and material palette that creates a range of effects by superimposition, adjacencies and light. The frieze acts as an environmental enclosure to provide an offset second skin to the program pieces -for shelter from wind in the winter, a zone for trapped sunlight and warmth, and in the summer, a cooler respite from the heat. Its length and colour make it a discreet landmark in the park, highly visible day and night.
The role of the artist has been given prominence where a number of approaches could be taken. The pavilion as a whole provides several opportunities for the artist's installation -either as specifie points / landmark features within the several orders of landscape rooms that have been provided, as surface features on the friezes and inner walls, as suspended elements from the interconnecting trellises that, with the frieze, binds landscape and building together. Multiple installations establishing a sequential order of interpretation would also be possible. The low sculpted planes of the roofscape, extending over both interior and exterior spaces, brings a distinctive new horizon line, visible from ail directions, not as a point, but as a thickened length, further extended and underlined by the introduction of balanced landscape elements -bosques, allees of trees, raised lawns, etc. At the same time, the views out from the pavilion and from its interconnecting open spaces are panoramic, also in ail directions, complementing the breadth of the open spaces on ail sides.
(From competitor's text)
8 scanned / 6 viewable
- Presentation Panel
- Presentation Panel
- Perspective
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