Hapa Collaborative: Located on a Middle Arm of the Fraser River, the Terra Nova landscape represents a myriad of landscape types: intertidal foreshore, dykes, remnant sloughs, and past and present agricultural use. The play experience borrows from the form and character of these existing types, integrating and embedding the play experience in the park setting. Hapa and Lynne Werker designed a public process that included the Big Kids Group, a team of advisors that guided us through the preliminary fact-finding and site analysis process, and the Little Kids Group, made up of students from two local schools, who offered their ideas and design talents to the process. The end result: a park that responds to its setting, its constituents, and the ‘imperfect grid’ formal language of Terra Nova.
Landscape Architecture: Hapa Collaborative in collaboration with the City of Richmond
Location: Richmond, BC Canada
Design Year: 2011
Completed: 2014
Image Credits: Joshua Dool
Team
1. Lynne Werker, Open House Facilitator
2. Macdonald & Lawrence
3. Kids of James Gilmore and Spul’u’kwuks Elementary Schools
I used to sit on this knoll and watch the sun set. The fading and dilapidated wooden fences still remaining from the stables that used to occupy the space in the 90s were beautifully overgrown with long grasses, wildflowers and weeds. It was so still, you could sit there in silence for hours looking out into the Pacific. I remember one time as I sat writing on the knoll the Snow Geese who take up the easterly fields rose in unison behind me and circled the skies above my head; sensing some profound sense of power and unity I closed my eyes and let my arms rise from my sides into the air. I hovered there, with the birds, on the brink of oblivion, until after time they settled back down in their field and I packed up and walked home along the dike.
Who is the playground manufacture for the Terra Nova Play Experience?
@sheena Kinsol did the timber play elements: https://www.kinsoltimber.com/kinsolplay