Urban Design- Lansdowne Park

Since starting my blog I have come across a number of things that have interested me. Before now I have been looking at sustainable sports stadium, as sports and architecture are two passion in my life. Along the way I been looking at sustainable sports stadiums around the world but have also come across the urban designs based around these stadiums so I started to look deeper into the urban design side of things but still around sporting facilities.

I recently came across a proposal for the Lansdowne Park in Ottawa Canada on the website "archdaily". The project has long been in the pipeline and was triggered when one side of the stadium was found to be unstable. This gave the opportunity to not just redevelop the stadium but to redevelop the surrounding area as well.

Archdaily showed the proposal from Cannon Design. I decided to look deeper and found what I believe to be the winning proposal by an landscape architect called Phillips Farevaag Smallenberg.The design was not just about the stadium but everything around the stadium as well, this is what interested me the urban design side and I think this is something that I might want to look into more.

The proposed complex has a large new park, redeveloped stadium, civic centre, and a new village with shop service and residential space



Before


After


I think this sort of project shows how important sports facilities and the surrounding area can be to a community. Its not just about the stadium but using that as a base for redeveloping the area around it so that the area has new life and is not just used once or twice a week by the sports team.

This is Phillips Farevaag Smallenberg vision statement.

"Lansdowne Park has held a complex relationship to the city of Ottawa. Its grand scale and 

civic focus has given it regional and national status, marked by sporadic and intense 

exhibition and sporting events. Its cultural and ceremonial importance is reinforced by 

physical linkages to Parliament Hill, Dow’s Lake, the Central Experimental Farm and other 

major institutional sites via the Rideau Canal and the NCC Parkway. It functions 

simultaneously as a much loved neighbourhood park accommodating everyday recreational 

program for nearby residents. Currently, these functions occur in an uncoordinated and

disconnected fashion, involving separate areas of the park.

Lansdowne Park is at a pivotal point in its evolution. When it was functioning as a more integrated site, hosting events of national prestige and showcasing the best of Canadian skill and ingenuity, the park had a much more significant civic and national identity. The fragmentation and dissolution of the site keeps undermining that embedded value. The plan proposed by OSEG needs to be sensitively and imaginatively integrated within the overall park scheme to avoid dissipating the Park’s already lagging identity and expression as both grand civic destination and intimate neighbourhood amenity. The parkland component needs to maximize its visibility, identity and connectivity in multiple ways. Otherwise it will be perceived as leftover, inaccessible space incidental to a commercial development. Win Place Show reinstates Lansdowne Park as a single, rich, multilayered node in the mental map of the city and the region. It makes it more accessible, more visible and more diversified."

This is a cool video looking at the new proposal.