gh3 to Design June Callwood Park in Toronto

Toronto-based architecture and landscape design firm gh3 have been awarded with the first prize in the international design competition for Toronto’s June Callwood Park.

The June Callwood Park is to be designed and developed as a new park, and significant addition to the public realm of Toronto’s Central Waterfront. The park is located at the foot of the historic Fort York area of Toronto in Ward 19. It will serve as the central public space for local neighborhood activities.

The new park is named in honor of June Callwood, who passed away in April 2007 at the age of 82. June Callwood was an internationally acclaimed female journalist, author, television host, community activist, recipient of nearly 20 honorary degrees, and Companion of the Order of Canada. Before her passing, June attended a naming ceremony for the park in July 2005.

gh3 was chosen as winning firm from four semi-finalists: Balmori & Associates and dTAH, gh3, Janet Rosenberg & Associates, and PMA Landscape Architects and Ground. A public exhibition of the four short-listed teams was held between October 18th to 21st, 2008.

The jury consisted of Nina-Marie Lister, Associate Professor, Ryerson University School of Urban & Regional Planning, Rocco Maragna, Architect, Maragna Architect Inc., Lisa Rochon, Architecture Critic, The Globe and Mail, Greg Smallenberg, Landscape Architect and Principal, Phillips, Farevaag, Smallenberg, Laura Solano, Landscape Architect and Principal, Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates Inc., George Stroumboulopoulous, TV host of The Hour, CBC, Margery Winkler, Professor, Ryerson University, School of Architecture.

This is how gh3 describe their design:

A Voice in the Forest. The starting point of our design takes a voice sampling of June’s own words—“I believe in kindness”—physically mapped onto the site, its undulations creating the abstract geometric pattern of openings and clearings within the dense groves of the Super-Real Forest. June spoke of kindness as “the god in our machinery,” believing in kindness rather than organized religion or God; these words are taken from her last interview expressing that core idea. The edge of this voice wave pattern creates a sinewy path that runs north to south through five clearings in the forest, connecting Lakeshore to Fort York, its black granite planks touching the edges at several points to provide east-west community access into the park.

The Super-Real Forest inhabits the site with plantings of native Canadian trees, a sampling of the specimens that would have inhabited the Lake Ontario shoreline at the time the city was settled. The park is loosely zoned into six clearings: the Puddle Plaza, the Puzzle Garden, the Maze, the Pink Field Plaza, Time Strip Gardens, and Ephemeral Pools, each with its own unique spatial character and aspects of unprogramed play it encourages.

The range of experience invited in the park is rooted in archetypal, timeless themes of human play, rather than contrived mechanical devices or apparatus that often limit their enjoyment to a specific age range. The surfaces openly invite activity that can be social, recreational or meditative. Support for play and self-directed games is implied in the spaces, open to ageless activities that could range from splashing in the shallow pools and puddles in summer, to hide-and-seek in the maze, to impromptu sports in the clearing and tai chi in the morning by the mist pools.

Intrinsic to the Super-Real Forest is the idea of ecological responsibility, its design inextricably bound to its underlying environmental imperative. Its open spaces are priceless amenities of good city living, the context for the kind of play that results in a healthy population. Investment in a forest commits to thinking long-term; we imagine the lifespan of the park will make it relevant to centuries of children and adults alike. The basic moves of the design—the creation of a richly varied forest interwoven with opportunities to enjoy the simple pleasures of community and play—find a common starting point in the fundamentally optimistic vision of life in the city that characterized June’s world view. Community engagement in the process will also play an important role: we imagine that Toronto youth will be active in the park’s creation and stewardship. Children from TDSB’s 451 elementary schools and 16 alternative elementary schools will be invited to plant a tree on behalf of their school, gathering on the site in early spring to take part in a city-wide planting ceremony that will celebrate June’s life and legacy in shaping our city. The forest planting will also welcome members of the community, friends and family of June, and people she influenced and mentored as well, who we will encourage to come together to plant a tree in June’s honor.

Images: gh3