A repurposed stormwater pipe becomes a fanciful walkway at the new Winter Olympics athletes' village at Southeast False Creek in Vancouver, British Columbia.

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Leaving an Olympics Legacy

Landscape Architecture
By Tim Newcomb, Published Thursday, February 2010

Come February 2010. The world will celebrate athletics during the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, British Columbia. But the landscape architects behind five new Olympics venues in and around Vancouver had more important things in mind: celebrating local use and Vancouver’s natural environment.

While some conjure visions of snow when they think Winter Olympics, the Vancouver venues are really about rain (don’t worry, Whistler, the mountain town two hours north of Vancouver where the skiing and sledding events will be held, will provide plenty of snow). Water encompasses Vancouver. From being situated along the Pacific Ocean’s Strait of Georgia to the variety of inlets, bays, harbors, and rivers that the city is tucked among, it isn’t hard to find waterfront property in Canada’s third-largest city. In fact, three of the new Olympic sites sit on reclaimed waterfront.

As a contrast to the blue of the water, the city prides itself on being green in two different ways. Not only are stretches of green parks and trees prominent throughout the region, but the city also has he strictest green building codes in North America.

In keeping with the spirit of sustainability, Olympics venues – unlike in Beijing- are about restraint and post-games use. Whether using current structures as is, remodeling old ones, or even building new sites, Vancouver isn’t making a splashy entry onto the world stage. Unlike the “Ice Cube,” the gargantuan Forest Park (see “Olympic Hopeful,” Landscape Architecture, March 2008), and other Beijing wow projects, Vancouver’s most iconic new location, the new Vancouver Convention Centre at Coal Harbour, was in the works far before the Olympics even materialized. It was added to the Olympics repertoire as the main media center, giving the province-owned structure and its six-acre green roof – the largest in North America outside of Ford’s River Rouge plant – world visibility.

Along with the new convention center, which the public is already using, an entirely new community is being built at the old industrial Southeast False Creek waterfront site. Its initial purpose will be to function as the Vancouver Olympic Village, but it will become a new neighborhood after the games, with the athletes’ condominiums being privately sold and new public buildings opened.

Organizers are using three structures for sports: BC Place for ceremonies, GM Place for hockey and figure skating, and Pacific Coliseum for short-track speed skating. Just two sites were built and one remodeled specifically for sports events in Vancouver (though there are additional mountain sites in the Whistler area). These five fresh projects (the village, the Vancouver Convention Centre, and the three sporting venues) are the work of four different, primarily local landscape architecture firms.

The new Richmond Olympic Oval, where long-track speed skating will take place, is owned by the city of Richmond south of Vancouver and is possibly the most Olympics-centric of all venues. While it will host speed skating events for years to come, it is also a community center complete with a new waterfront park.

The Vancouver Olympic Centre, which will host curling, was conceptualized before the Olympics but only materialized because of the games. The city-owned site inside a park will morph into a community center, library, day care, and aquatic center postgames. A remodeled Thunderbird Arena for hockey at the University of British Columbia expands community and university recreation and event opportunities.

Because the event organizers and the designers of the outdoor spaces envisioned postgame community use, the linking themes between the sites are few, alive mainly because of their shared purpose – the games. This is fortunate for the people of Vancouver, because the designs weren’t created just as showpieces for the world, but for community use. From people dipping their feet in the water at the new interactive shoreline at Southeast False Creek to people clamoring (60,000 on opening weekend) to get a glimpse of the new convention center green roof, the new landscapes provide nature-based opportunities for the local population. After all, natural surroundings are what living in Vancouver is all about – even after the games are long gone.

Vancouver Olympic Village at Southeast False Creek
Vancouver’s last untouched industrial waterfront received a makeover fit for the world’s Olympic athletes, but it was all done with the locals in mind. The 80-acre site (50 acres of which are publicly owned, including 26 acres of open space) is being turned into a new waterfront community complete with condominiums, a park, a community center, a seawall, a preserved historic building, and a new island.

While planning and design work have been ongoing for more than six years and the bulk of the city’s 50 acres has been constructed for the Olympic Village – there is still a 30-acre section left for future development – the summer of 2009 marked Vancouver’s first uses of the new waterfront space. Other portions won’t be open to the public until after the Olympics.

Margot Long, ASLA, a partner in Vancouver’s PWL Partnership Landscape Architects, designed the public landscape including the new shoreline. Vancouver requires any construction project to replace lost shoreline by a margin of two to one. And since unsightly and fragmented inlets were covered over at the old industrial site, the project team had to figure out a way to create more shoreline. Hence, the landscape architects designed a brand-new island off the shore of the development. While technically a peninsula (the city required stepping stones above the water line as a way off the site), the half-acre Habitat Island is still a piece of natural serenity in an urban area. Old Douglas fir snags beckon birds, logs on the beach provide a place for people to rest, and pathways meander through native vegetation. It is one of the only places in Vancouver where the tidal change can be seen. Herring have even returned to the False Creek Inlet for the first time in 80 years.

How to manage Habitat Island remains a mystery, since dogs and a swell of people on the space could easily trample down what has been created. “We will see if it can be self-managed,” Long says. “It will be a huge headache for the (Vancouver) Parks Board.” If the public can’t manage it, closure may be the only future option.

Just a few steps from the island sits Hinge Park, connecting two of the city’s three themes for the area (rail yard, shipyard, and work yard). The park spans – literally, with a bridge reminiscent of an old gangway – open space to a future elementary school site and condominium high-rises that will house the athletes. Through the greenspace runs a stormwater-cleansing wetland. Instead of burying water with piping, water was brought into the park, serving as an educational tool. In fact, old pipes left on the former city workyard site have been turned into playground equipment. Once full, the creek spills into the False Creek saltwater.

The 650-meter seawall creates separate paths for pedestrian and bikers – as is the norm in Vancouver – and ties in subtle historical elements of the three themes. Long says she would have liked to vary the width of the pathway, but city requirements wouldn’t allow it. She did add planting strips between the paths, creating visual breaks. The shipyard area features large metal dock ties along the seawall, while timber is a key feature in the rail yards. Even historic lumber mill markers are woven into the seawall. The robust character of the space features workaday materials such as iron, timber, and rough granite.

Large granite steps below the seawall are designed to be reminiscent of ballast from ships and allow visitors to interact with the water, a new concept for Vancouver’s seawalls. Specially designed oversized lounge chairs and swiveling metal chairs provide an artistic, urban flair. Solar compacting trash cans with recycling bins add sustainability. A prominent inlet was expanded with a canoe-shaped metal bridge spanning the water. The enclosed tidal amphitheater with granite steps provides a place for people to sunbathe and watch floating exhibits. And, of course, stormwater runnels are featured throughout.

The athlete’s plaza, designed by Chris Phillips, ASLA, partner in Vancouver’s Phillips Farevaag Smallenberg, sits between the seawall and the historic salt building – the only old structure to remain. Phillips says the space is about telling a narrative story of the site’s history. As a spot for large gatherings, the open space is in the shape of a ship, and the ribs lining the site are reminiscent of that theme. The area will serve as the athletes’ front door during the games and as a community plaza post-games.

Developer Millennium Water built the village residences for sale as private condominiums. They feature green roofs and private courtyards full of water features created by Peter Kreuk, ASLA, and Jennifer Stamp, ASLA, of Vancouver’s Durante Kreuk landscape architects. Stamp says the Olympics’ goal of sustainability plays in with the development’s social sustainability goals by having “backyard” courtyards that promote urban agriculture with personal garden plots and fruit-bearing plants.

As for the athletes, there actually wasn’t much thought put into them. “it was all about the end user,” says Kreuk.

The entire site, which pushes the boundaries for the city with its sustainability features, really is a major experiment, adds Long. From the new-look shoreline to solar-powered trash cans and recycling bins, the city isn’t sure how the sustainable features will work. So far, the site has been a success. Even without residents in the neighboring buildings, the place was packed last summer. “It is such a change from the rest of the seawall.” Long says.

“There is an ability for people to get down to the water. It is a different experience. The city wants to take the lessons here into different places.” She admits that seeing so many kids using the site has been rewarding. “All of our projects should be filled with people using the space,” she says. Well, everybody but the skateboarders, that is. Rivers throughout the project, which appear shiplike, are actually skateboard deterrents.

Along with the island, the city will have to deal with maintenance costs all along the seawall. There wasn’t enough money to properly reinforce the site, which sits entirely on fill, so all the pavers and materials are created for easy change out. That design solution may also become a maintenance nightmare. But for now, judging by the site’s usage, potential nightmares give way to the realized dream of reclaiming an old, unused waterfront.

The entire area’s historic tie-ins, the use of reclaimed materials from on site (boardwalk walls are old city sidewalk concrete), and the successful connection of the last undeveloped waterfront in the downtown core to the adjacent neighborhoods make the seawall the highlight of the design. Opportunities to interact with water off the granite steps and to celebrate natural elements on Habitat Island are in exciting new way to develop shoreline in Vancouver. How well the interior of the site, including Hinge Park and the rooftop greenspaces, is embraced by neighborhood residents won’t be known, of course, until after the Olympics, but right now the site is all about the new seawall. If the city can keep the pedestrian-centered stretch looking clean and natural, giving city dwellers the chance to touch nature with their toes will be the real legacy of the new Olympics community.

Vancouver Convention Centre
In what has become the most iconic of Vancouver’s new landscapes, the six-acre green roof on the new Vancouver Convention Centre was the result of PWL Partnership’s Bruce Hemstock’s vision of creating a public educational tool.

The roof is the culmination of a roughly 1.2-mile corridor of waterfront greenspace, with well loved Stanley park on one end, Harbour Green park in the middle, and new vegetation rolling up onto the roof of the convention center on the other end. The center also ties the other waterfront parks to the downtown core, but the 40-foot elevation gain between the old park and new center required ingenuity. That is actually where the green roof came in. The roof stairsteps up over a restaurant and two levels of the center, metaphorically and practically extending the green carpet of the park onto the building. A pedestrian walkway allows visitors to meander through the lower portion of the roof, which is covered in Pacific Northwest coastal grasses and includes interpretive signs.

The roof holds 5,000 cubic meters of growing medium and doesn’t exceed eight inches in depth, due to load requirements. The roof uses runnels to collect rainwater for reuse inside the center. Because the ultimately $890 million (Canadian) convention center project had doubled in cost during the course of construction, it was lambasted by the public for being a white elephant, enhancing the pressure for Hemstock to create something special. To appease the public, a mandate from the province required the use of local materials, even though those weren’t always the design or cost choices Hemstock wanted to make and could create maintenance issues in the future.

When the center opened, the architectural community was skeptical of the building and even Hemstock’s roof was met with criticism. Roof plantings weren’t prominent at the start, and the plants didn’t take off until 2009, when the grace reached Hemstock’s knee. However, as the roof grew into its own, the public and critical acclaim shifted.

“We took a lot of criticism for {the center} not being dynamic enough when it opened,” Hemstock says. “Then we had this amazing shift where all of these people who said it wasn’t iconic enough did an about-face.” He credits the roof plantings with the shift.

While the roof gets all the press, it was the integration of other plazas on the site, also designed as part of this renovation by PWL, that was the most challenging, Hemstock says. He worked with the center’s architects to create a grand staircase that allows pedestrians to travel up the grade.

This creates a new view corridor and changes the setting from park to urban. “We wanted to make sure this did not become a back door,” Hemstock says. The split granite of the park wall shifts to the polished granite of the convention center district, illustrating the change. The park’s garden was extended up a grassy embankment next to the stairs, with a variety of maple trees, so tourists can literally take home souvenir leaves that fall.

The plaza areas adjacent to the streets posed their own set of difficulties. Since directly under the public space sits an underground biking tunnel and parking garage, load limits were a factor. Small gardens, instead of heavy trees, give the space life using textures, colors, flowers, and grasses. At the one spot where weight was allowed, on top of the garage’s building columns, Hemstock placed large light posts to delineate the district and its widened sidewalks. Runnels encircle the posts, showing off the flow of water.

To make three acres feel intimate, Hemstock broke the plaza into three different connected areas with grading changes. Sight lines point visitors to views of the mountains and harbor, creating spaces that aren’t just boxed-in courtyards.

An extension of the seawall pedestrian and biking path – with completion planned for after the Olympics – will curve around the center on an artificial waterfront and gradually rise in elevation before connecting to Vancouver’s expansive biking corridors on the far side of the site.

While it remains to be seen once the construction is done if the site’s flow works as planned and if the plazas actually become Hemstock’s dream of intimate locations, the exterior space does provide the downtown community and convention center guests with a new gathering location wit scenic views. Ample open space – with benches – is tucked up against the center to invite pedestrians to sit and take in the harbor activity while feeling separated from the bustle of the sidewalks. The convention center is a link between two downtown worlds, but it is also a link with enough reasons to draw users in.

And about the Olympics? It didn’t change the design, just added pressure – not that there wasn’t enough of that already with a $14 million landscape that may become a popular TV shot during the games. It now falls to the roof to convey Vancouver’s sustainable image during the Olympics to the rest of the world.

Read the Full article in Landscape Architecture Magazine