A walk along the water
Margot Long and Robin Petri are two of the many creative minds behind the innovative Southeast False Creek waterfront. We take a tour of what they've achieved.
Cheryl Rossi, Vancouver Courier
Published: Wednesday, July 09, 2008
Bicycles lean against oversized steel cleats at the end of a timber pier that juts from a new stretch of seawall in Southeast False Creek. A cyclist on a gleaming white north-facing lounger chats with a friend on the adjoining seat that faces south in the afternoon June sunshine.
"See, people always face the sun," says Robin Petri, the city's manager of engineering for Southeast False Creek and Olympic Village, as she glances in their direction. "There's always a big discussion about which way to face them... It just makes sense that people would want to face the view, and then there's always someone smart who says, no, they'll want to face the sun."
That smart someone was Derek Lee, who works with Margot Long at PWL Partnership, a landscape architecture firm based in Vancouver. But before the city unveiled the extra-wide loungers evocative of deck chairs on a cruise ship, vandals tagged them.
Luckily--or wisely--PWL recommended to the city that the outdoor furniture for Southeast False Creek be manufactured by Landscape Forms, an American company known for high quality work. Workers succeeded in scrubbing the corrosion-resistant chairs clean because of the powder coat paint surface on the hot-dipped galvanized steel.
The extra care given to the design of the chairs, including their ability to withstand vandalism, reflects the deliberate planning that went into Vancouver's newest, and one of its most inspiring, public spheres.
Petri can't believe how much thought goes into designing public spaces. She started working on the Southeast False Creek development in 2001.
"I was just amazed at how much people think about how you and I walking down the seawall, how we might feel," the former management consultant says.
Twenty-five key consultants and parks board and city staffers worked together on Southeast False Creek. And while they all had different concerns, including feel, durability, maintenance, safety and security, Petri says they made the massive $14 million project succeed in a relatively short time.
The official development plan for the area was approved by the city in spring 2005, and designers were hired to realize the seaside public spaces in summer 2005. Hay and Company Consultants Inc. spent a year-and-a-half building up the foreshore, pathway construction began in 2007, the new bike and pedestrian path opened last December and construction of the pedestrian walk, foreshore and island was completed in June.
It's easy to admire, and quickly take for granted, the public places that help Vancouver sparkle. But hours of planning, design, discussion, and hard labour coalesce in the paths, parks and other public places where we like to linger. Our newest public space, a widened, uninterrupted seaside path between Cambie Bridge and Ontario Street is no exception, with custom-designed seating, warm wooden touches, solar-powered compacting trash cans and nods to the neighbourhood's industrial past. With Margot Long as a guide, the Courier took a tour along the innovative and practical paths landscape architects, urban designers, planners, developers and engineers together tread.