Brunswick-College Parkette Design Competition

Submission overview

Competition closed!! See submissions and winners here.

Competition criteria

The winning design will innovative, spectacular and inviting to all who look forward to a redesigned Brunswick-College Parkette. It will also be practical. As well as aesthetics, it will emphasise economic realities, accessibility, safety, ease of cleaning and maintenance and conformity with Parks guidelines.

Challenges

Brunswick-College parkette is shabby, rundown and hard to maintain. It is a garbage trap that fails to complement its prominent location or properly serve its diverse community. While the parkette is shunned by most of those who might use of it (local residents, the staff and clients of Kensington Health Centre and Kensington Gardens long term care facility and local businesses, as well as tourists, local schoolchildren and passers-by) the majority of the few people who do use the parkette, day and night, are members of Toronto’s homeless community.

The Brunswick-College parkette site is jointly owned and administered by Kensington Health Centre and City of Toronto, Parks and Recreation. While both are aware of the parkette’s problems and in favour of its improvement, plans for the parkette’s re-design will need to be approved by both – KHC and City Parks - (as well as by Toronto City Planning and Heritage Preservation services) before they can be executed. And – very important! - since funding is bound to be limited, the winning design must be practical as well as imaginative.

It will appeal to all of the parkette’s potential users — as well as its present users — but it cannot be extravagant!

How to participate?

The Brunswick-College Parkette Design Competition is open to everyone and anyone, from professionals and students of architecture and environmental design to children and adults of any age or design experience.

Your submission

• Design Kit: detailed site plans, elevations and sections of the parkette as it is, now; an accurate guide to its layout and its problems for participants who will want to present their ideas for the parkette’s re-design as clearly and as vividly as possible.

• Basic Design Kit: to guide participants of any age or experience (including children, whose submissions will be most welcome), a set of basic site drawings which provide a template that may be marked up, altered or used as a guides for their own artwork.

• Photographs of the parkette, taken from different perspectives, at different seasons.

• Application Form, which must completed and delivered with every submission.

Submission requirements

• a 150 word explanation of your submission in English or French, which will include your impression of the parkette as it would be experienced, if it were rebuilt according to your design. (Submissions longer than 150 words will not be read.)

• Graphics and Models (scale1/8in = 1ft or 1/100, is recommended) may be:

  • A 2D graphic representation of your design, on card or paper, A3 size (11x17in) or smaller. Graphic submissions may be mounted on a standard folding display board, one per submitter. Additional paperwork will be judged but it will only be displayed if space is available. Any number of pages may be submitted but they must be numbered.

  • A 3D scale model of your design, mounted on a baseboard that does not exceed 11x17in.
    (To facilitate safe storage, models should not be submitted before Sat, 19th March. Personal delivery of models – preceded by an email to all three coordinators, who are identified in “Submissions” below - is recommended. )

  • A CD or DVD of your design in 2D or 3D, in PDF format.
    (Submitters must understand that putting CD or DVD entries on public display may be problematic or impossible. Mounted hard copy printouts are recommended.)

  • A Competition Application Form must be enclosed with your submission, inside a sealed envelope with your return address clearly marked. Please download the application form here: http://harbordvillage.com/bcp/BCPapplicationform.pdf

  • Submissions should be identified by name and affiliation (school, college, university or if you live, work attend school or own a business in the neighbourhood.) Affiliation may be omitted if you have none but want to take on the challenge of re-designing the Brunswick-College parkette.

SUBMISSIONS WITH APPLICATION FORMS, must be sent or delivered, by mail, courier or in person, in a single sealed package, no later than the competition deadline:
midnight, Saturday, March 31st, 2011 to:

Richard Longley, Co-ordinator
HVRA Brunswick-College Parkette Design Competition
68 Brunswick Avenue
Toronto ON, M5S 2L7

email: longley_fovea@sympatico.ca
also please cc: yvanmackinnon@gmail.com and brownge@sympatico.ca

(cc’s are important, they will collect submissions and respond to emails whenever the coordinator is absent. Again, it is recommended that models are delivered personally between 19-31 March, 2011, no earlier and certainly no later.)

Also important:

1. While all submissions will be treated with great care, neither the coordinator nor Harbord Village Residents’ Association can take responsibility for any loss or damage that might occur during transit, while submissions are in storage or on public display or throughout the review and judging process. Contestants will be urged to recover their submissions in person or to arrange for their collection, at their own expense, as soon as possible after the competition is judged and results are declared.

2. As the sponsor and organizer of the Brunswick-College Parkette Design Competition, Harbord Village Residents’ Association reserves the right to select and combine the ideas of different entrants in any executed design, with appropriate credits on the plaque that will be installed at the site, if this is deemed likely to produce the best possible result.

3. While HVRA lacks, at present, the funding needed to implement a winning design, potential contestants should be aware that interest in this prominent site – on the part of local residents and businesses, Kensington Health Centre, City Parks and representatives of the local homeless community, is intense. Because of those shared concerns, HVRA is convinced that this competition will attract, from a variety sources, the funding needed for rebuilding of the Brunswick-College Parkette.