Posted Feb 8, 2013, 4:10 PM
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Wannabe Urbanite
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Join Date: Aug 2010
Location: Waterloo/London
Posts: 708
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I don't usually read any columns by Ian Gillespie, but this article is worth reading for the details of the new Market Lane Redevelopment.
Quote:
Gillespie: After spending time with designer, our columnist vows to keep an open mind
By Ian Gillespie, The London Free Press
Thursday, February 7, 2013 9:22:53 EST PM
On this wintry weekday afternoon, it looks bleak — nothing more than a forsaken alley with a handful of bare trees, a long concrete bench, a few concrete stools and something that resembles a fishnet strung with tiny lights suspended overhead.
Today, this Market Lane path between Dundas St. and Covent Garden Market is still a construction site — a construction site that is, according to its designer, about 95% finished.
But today, it doesn’t look much like something that cost the city more than $600,000. And it surely doesn’t look like something that’s going to deliver that undefinable wow factor.
But Joe Fry, the Vancouver-based architect behind this project, preaches patience.
“Why don’t you withhold judgment on that until the (light) canopy is up and running?” he says. “It’s up to you guys what you want to make of this space. The $600,000 (cost) is, I think, immense value for what we’ve got here.”
Though initially skeptical, I have to admit that after spending an hour with Fry, I’m optimistic about this project.
Designed by Fry’s Hapa Collaborative firm, the laneway features a “meander” bench whose curves are designed to echo the ebb and flow of the Thames River, a series of concrete stools lit from below and, by spring, a landscape featuring native plants, four honey locust trees and two linden trees.
But the centrepiece of this space is the overhead canopy; about 1,400 LED bulbs suspended from five steel archways that, in concert with lights mounted on the arches themselves, are designed to produce hundreds of complex designs and patterns.
The patterns will be controlled by a computer housed in the yet-to-be-completed Fanshawe College campus next door.
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http://www.lfpress.com/2013/02/07/gi...p-an-open-mind
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It sounds fantastic, and I can't wait to go through there when it opens! Really hope that this, along with the new Fanshawe campus, is successful in helping to breath even more life into downtown.
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"Sometimes I wonder if the world's so small, that we can never get away from the sprawl.
Living in the sprawl the dead shopping malls rise like mountains beyond mountains and there's no end in sight." -Arcade Fire
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