Van Alen Institute

integrating sports. The earthwork or landform created by this reshaping of the land provides cyclists, for example, a surface to ride on. "Increasingly, architects today are looking at landscape as a model," says Allen. "Landscape architecture is an art of surfaces and systems. Urbanistically, it is a valuable model for process It is successive, not final. It grows, changes over time."
Like Tschumi, the team likewise sets up oppositions to clarify what their project is about."Nature vs. culture" is

periphery. The digital - the 21st-century version of the “urban” - permeates the wild. Tschumi divides and interlocks cultural and recreational components with the natural, the wild. The buildings that house the cultural and recreational facilities will be clad in digital screens with the ability to constantly morph, creating a soft edge, blurring landscape and architecture.
-B.B

the social and natural histories of the site while developing its potential as a new landscape - one capable of supporting new ecologies and an evolving array of public uses and events, including ones of national distinction. The design was intended to inaugurate and structure the transformation of the site while remaining open to change and growth over time. An international call for Expressions of Interests produced 179 submissions from twenty-two countries, many from multi-disciplinary teams.

to be adapted for cultural, recreational and community uses. This precinct has been tentatively called the Cultural Campus. Beyond these areas, the overall site of the airbase includes another 320 acres of land that will be developed using long-term land leases in order to generate revenue for the Park. Of these 320 acres, 70 acres will be used for ongoing operational requirements by the military. These developable lands will remain in public ownership and it is intended that the park will grow in size over

time. The site is surrounded by communities that date back to the 1950s and 1960s and is well served by public transit, local arterial roads and regional highways. The design proposals were required to be conceived for a three-stage implementation process set over a fifteen-year period, in keeping with the anticipated revenue stream from the developable lands. The overall construction budget is $145 million (CDN) with $40 million (CDN) allocated for the initial phase. The Park is intended to be financially self-sustaining.

Downsview Park is being created on 320 acres of a former military airbase. When the base was established in the 1940s it was located on the periphery of Toronto. Today it is located in the heart of the Greater Toronto Area. Downsview Park will be the Government of Canada’s first national urban park, complementing an extensive system of national wilderness parks. The objective of the design competition was to promote innovative design proposals that would respond to

Of these, five teams were invited to participate in a limited design competition, which began in late November 1999 and concluded in early May 2000. The site has been open to the public since 1996 and includes landscapes of the former airbase - open and rolling meadows punctuated by sports fields, trees, and occasional buildings no longer in active use. As well, the design of the Park encompasses a precinct of industrial and military buildings, including an immense aircraft hangar, which are intended

deal. They sought to extend the park into the world through ecosystems, circulation, but also are willing to accept other forces coming in. “We want to blur the boundaries between the inside and the outside of the park,” says Mau. In addition to weaving the park into the city fabric, Tree City likewise brings the city’s infrastructure into the park by serving as an intermodal transportation hub. The project proposes creating a tunnel to go under the runway to accommodate a major avenue. As Tree City is presented, the

underscore the need for circulation. It is this approach that draws from pop culture, with its tone once only under the purview of political activists, performance artists, and moreover, advertisers, that is their trademark. -B.B.

using a self-organizing system as a tool. For Brown, mathematician Stuart Kauffman’s theories provide the minimal framework necessary for Downsview with its need for flexibility. The parti approach to designing a park gives way to a point/dot system. For Kauffman, a patchwork organization is preferable to the classical approach with its one big idea - one organizing principle - “a frozen lake” as it were. A self-organizing system of big and small patches is preferable.
- B.B.

“It is a formula, not a design,” explains co-winner Bruce Mau. “There is not a fixed outcome, but more of an algorithm, more like designing a vector or a tendency, and making perimeters that determine the vector. We set in motion an evolving process with a series of connected points and by inflecting those you control the outcome. It is a formula or recipe rather than a design.
Tree City was a pragmatic response to an unknowable condition. We didn’t

know enough about possible scenarios." Formally, Tree City will be comprised of a matrix of circular tree clusters on a quarter of the site, with meadows, playing fields and gardens occupying the balance. While initially the park will serve as a green destination within the city, the intention is that this “vegetal epicenter” will connect with the rest of Toronto’s green spaces, creating a park system laced throughout Greater Toronto. For the winning team, the creation of the park presented a two-part Faustian

So we wondered if you could create complexity through a consistent approach to all the systems that organize it.” Their organizing principle became a “circuit system.” The team sought an even broader cultural input, inviting the participation of those from other creative fields including filmmaker Atom Egoyan. Egoyan was interested in one of the site’s existing structures and proposed that it be converted into a project that explored how the Internet could become a social and communal experience.-B.B.

Foreign Office Architects, Tokyo
Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blumberg Architects, Toronto
Tom Leader and James Haig Streeter of PWP Landscape Architects, Berkeley

Cochrane Brook, Toronto
Atom Egoyan, Toronto
MBTW Group, Toronto
Dillon Consulting, Toronto
Habitat Works, Toronto
Allen Kani Associates, Toronto
Kirk Biggar & Associates, Toronto
Helyar & Associates, Toronto
Marjory Jacobson, Boston
Gerry Shikatani, Toronto
Yolles Partnership, Toronto
RWDI, Guelph
Hahn Smith Design, Toronto
Aercoustics Engineering Ltd., Toronto

team’s irony and hyperbole make them provocative. They create slogans, invert common assumptions and use humor to make their point. In one of the renderings for the project we see a yoga class exercising with an ominous looking plane looming as if it might take them out, vividly underscoring the unusual mix of uses at Downsview. They talk about “manufacturing nature” to debunk the notion of the two realms being mutually exclusive, and they suggest building 1,000 pathways to

Emergent Landscapes, Brown and Storey Architects’ scheme took hybridization as a given, looking not to the search for form, but looking more to process. James Brown describes it as a dynamic approach concerned more with setting in motion a system, which will evolve and co-evolve with the neighborhood. The crux of Emergent Landscapes is creating community through this interconnected nodal network, and by linking infrastructures to capitalize on their intermodality,

This project, submitted by Foreign Office Architects, Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blumberg Architects, and Tom Leader and James Haig Streeter of PWP Landscape Architects, creates a sculptural landform - ridges - that serve an ecological purpose, while also creating terraces for extreme sports activities. “We took a didactic approach. It is readable,” says Shirley Blumberg.“It is not like a natural landscape. For us the challenge was to synthesize all systems and orders that might influence the park of the future: the ecological, historical and recreational. In the 1960s, the collage created complexity and contradiction.

On November 13, 2000 hundreds of people gathered at Van Alen Institute for the opening of the Downsview Competition Exhibition.

The exhibit consists of the five finalist models and competition boards and is on display through December 15th. The exhibit is sponsored by Parc Downsview Park Inc., a subsidiary of the Canada Lands Company Ltd.,
and Van Alen Institute.

In 1858, New York held a design competition for Central Park, and the results established a new paradigm for public space in North America--a place of refuge from the city. In 2000, the Downsview Park International Design Competition, in Toronto, promises to do the same. The finalist teams displayed represent the end of the segregation between city and country--a move towards a paradigm in which city=park.

Brown and Storey Architects, Toronto

Heiko Sieker, Berlin
KMK Consultants, Brampton
iTrans, Richmond Hill
Urban Forest Associates, Toronto
John Mighton, Toronto
Dr. Harold Schroeter, Guelph
ReK Productions, Toronto
Yolles Partnership, Toronto
Nasser Design, Brookline

The project submitted by Bernard Tschumi Architects, Dereck Revington Studio and Sterling Finlayson Architects vividly evidences this changing of the ideological guard. When Tschumi proposed Parc de la Villette in the 1980s, with its red events undulating through a relatively dense Paris urban park, it was put forth as a “a park of the 21st century.” Now, years later, with the same directive, Tschumi expressly chose as his parti the exact opposite of his approach in

Paris. Tschumi’s team set up polarities-Words that DO NOT describe Downsview/Words that DO describe Downsview. Playing on that set of opposites, “oil and water” became the paradigm for the whole project. “I was interested in how the digital could give new ways of reading landscapes,” describes Tschumi, who sees the current digitization of our society as the appropriate opposition to the wild. His team conceived the idea of “viscous fingering,” wherein liquid fingers metaphorically reach out to the

Bernard Tschumi Architects, New York
Dereck Revington Studio, Toronto
Sterling Finlayson Architects, Toronto

Gunta Mackars, Landscape Architect, Toronto
Ove Arup & Partners, New York/London
Read Voorhees, Toronto
Stephan Murphy, Waterloo
W. Andrew Kenney, Toronto
Dan Euser, Toronto
Eric Haldenby, Waterloo
Helyar & Associates, Toronto

James Corner/Field Operations and Stan Allen Architects' Emergent Ecologies- a resounding theme in this process-oriented competition- presents a 15-year framework comprised of two complementary organizing systems: circuit ecologies which can loosely be distilled to circulation, and through-flow ecologies that represent things like energy, matter, people, water. A ridge and furrow system will provide drainage for the damaged soil while

rejected over "culture as nature". In looking at the entries, Christian Hubert, architect and director of the Master of Architecture program at the University of Toronto, is struck by how the entries look outside the design disciplines in negotiating the melding of the natural and the artificial.-B.B.

James Corner/Field Operations, Philadelphia
Stan Allen, Stan Allen Architect, New York

Michael Horsham, Tomato, London
Craig Schwitter, Buro Happold, New York
Herve Descottes, L'Observatoire International
Tom Cahill and Michelle Adams, Tom Cahill Associates, West Chester
Chris Zlocki, HLW Strategies, New York
Chris Graham, Royal Botanical Gardens, Burlington
Marc Mayer, The Powerplant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto
Edward Relph, University of Toronto
Nina-Marie Lister, Ryerson Polytechnic University, Toronto
PENN PRAXIS, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia

Rem Koolhaas, Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Rotterdam
Bruce Mau Design, Toronto
Oleson Worland Architect, Toronto
Inside/Outside, Amsterdam

Ove Arup & Partners, New York/London Arup Environmental, New York/London
RWDI, Guelph
BA Consulting, Toronto
Moonstone Landscape, Coldwater
Noel Harding, Toronto Helyar & Associates, Toronto