Landscape – Great Idea! X-LArch III - Department für Raum ...

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Each of the proposals takes seriously the client’s charge
to embrace the concepts of naturalization of the river’s
mouth, enhanced site ecologies, the sustainable development
of urban spaces, and flood control and stakes out
considerable areas of open landscape to perform these
functions. Where the MVVA scheme distinguishes itself
is in the degree to which the landscape is recognized as
the primary engine of urban transformation. (Figure 2)
Similar to Charles Eliot’s design for the Metropolitan Park
the MVVA scheme, in its decision to preserve the Keating
Channel, in it its attempts to locate the mouth of the
river in a place that it “wants” to be, and in the reciprocal
relationship that is established between urban landscape
and urban development demonstrates a command of a
full range of urban landscape typologies.
Fig. 2
ditionalism over attempts to engage the multivalence of
context in its various guises and as it evolves over time.
In Brooklyn Bridge Park in Brooklyn, New York, and
the Lower Don Lands development in Toronto, Ontario,
Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Inc. has lead large
teams in the exploration of the urban landscape typologies
as a function of social, psychological, environmental,
economic, and infrastructural initiatives working in
concert to reinforce one another. In each case, the client
has given the landscape architect and the project team
opportunities to frame the task of the project in a way that
will ultimately benefit the integrity of the urban landscape.
Landscape Typologies as Urban Framework in the
Toronto’s Lower Don Lands
In the Lower Don Lands Urban development project in
Toronto, the competition brief seeks out a radical repositioning
and reprioritizing of natural systems, landscape
systems, transportation systems, and architectural
environments. The 280-acre site is located on a portion
of a larger territory that was once a vast wetland created
by the Lower Don River as it emptied into Lake Ontario.
No longer useful as a shipping hub and now devoid of
natural features, public infrastructure, and neighborhood
amenities, the site is fundamentally unprepared to support
new urban growth. (Figure 1) Building on initiatives
that were being undertaken elsewhere along the waterfront,
the client sought to transform the site into a new
mixed-use neighborhood alongside the creation of a new
naturalized mouth to Don River that would improve the
city’s current system of flood protection as well as reinvigorating
the ecological diversity of the city.
MVVA’s commission to design the Lower Don Lands
evolved out of an international competition with four
highly resolved schemes developed by the finalists.
Starting with the pragmatics of flood control and on-site
treatment of contaminated sediment, MVVA’s scheme
carves a large meander through the site, allowing the
river to slow down and release sediment before emptying
into the lake. The accumulation of years of dredged contaminated
sediment that is currently housed in industrial
silos that are approaching capacity will be used to raise
the elevation of the site, further separating the architecture
from the flood plain, and create new landforms. The
schedule for the project takes into account the time it
will take to de-contaminate the soil using phytoremediation.
These large scale landscape gestures are borne
of necessity, but are also big contributors to landscape
program by way of a major new park space for the city.
As generators of urban form and starting points for
landscape program, they have an analogue in the next
typological layer to inform the design, the unique landscape
experiences made possible by the existing site’s
industrial infrastructure like the Keating Channel and the
Gardiner Expressway. A notch down from this scale is
the system of urban connections, or streetscapes, as well
as specific pieces of landscape program that is found
Fig. 3
Papers