무더운 6월의 햇살아래 아이들의 신나는 물놀이가 이루어지던
분수연못은 이제 도시인들의 겨울 레포츠중 하나인 스케이트장으로 새롭게 재구성된다.
이러한 공간적 특징은 총 3개의 블록으로 이루어진 워싱턴파크의
3개의 블록중 남측블록의 게터링 스페이스와 파빌리온으로
계절에 따라 가변적인 장소성을 띈다.
게터링스페스는 계절에 따라 도시생활의 패러다임을 반영 다른
장소로 시민들에게 제공된다. 파빌리온은 약 4,000스퀘어피트 면적에
레스토랑, 휴게실, 스케이트 렌턀샵으로 구성되며 야외공간을 지원한다.
다른 테마로의 변신은 공원내 랜드스케이프와 시설물들에게
다른 공간감과 사용처로 활용된다. -시민들의 산책을 위한 벤치는
스케이트를 이용하는 사람들의 휴게공간으로-
도시의 공용공간은 바라보는 곳이 아니라 사용되어야 하고 즐길 수 있어야 한다.
그리고 가급적 많은 이들에게 공평하게 열려야 한다.
reviewed by SJ
On a hot June day in Washington Canal Park, swimsuited kids kicked a ball as they splashed around a shallow fountain. Close by, a mother hung a piñata from one of the park's looping metal sculptures by artist David Hess. If you looked north, you could see a solitary woman doing yoga on the grass. To the south, people in Washington Nationals caps drank iced tea and Bloody Marys at an outdoor café.
That might seem like a lot of activity for a 3-acre park, especially in a newly redeveloped neighborhood. But it's exactly what the designers had in mind. “It's jam-packed,” says Steve Benz, the partner in charge of the project at the landscape architecture firm Olin. “The intention was to provide a diversity of activities and places that would appeal to a wide range of people.”
Washington Canal Park opened late last year, one small piece of a new multibillion-dollar district that is emerging on the north bank of the Anacostia River in a once-neglected section of Washington, D.C. Just a couple of blocks to the south, closer to the water, sits the 5-year-old Nationals baseball stadium, the main catalyst for the emerging Capitol Riverfront area. Rising next to it is The Yards, a 5.5 million-square-foot mixed-use development with a waterfront park by M. Paul Friedberg and Partners.
A few blocks inland, the Canal Park site was a less obvious candidate for regeneration. It had been a canal in the 19th century, connecting the Anacostia to the Potomac River. By the 1870s it was being used as an open storm sewer, and in the first part of the 20th century—following reports of passersby falling in and drowning—it was paved over. The District of Columbia acquired the site in the 1940s and most recently used it as a parking lot for school buses.
In the early 2000s, plans coalesced for a new federal Department of Transportation headquarters near the site and the redevelopment of a large public housing complex into a mixed-income residential project. The city eyed the former canal as a centerpiece of the reborn neighborhood. It set up a public-private partnership with developer WC Smith to fund and oversee the project. “We were brought in to create a park for a neighborhood that did not yet exist, using public open space as an economic driver,” says David Rubin, the project's original lead designer, who has since left Olin and is now a partner at Land Collective.
The design team responded by knitting a host of spaces and functions into a varied but cohesive landscape. The park stretches across three narrow blocks. The northern block is the most passive and “serene,” says Benz, with a bosquet of trees leading to an expanse of grass. The middle block mixes pastoral spaces with active ones, like the fountain. Floating above the water is a small pavilion for performances.
The southernmost block is the busiest, with a 250-foot-long ice-skating loop that defaults to a gathering space in warmer seasons, and a 4,000-square-foot pavilion that houses the Park Tavern restaurant, restrooms, and a skate-rental booth. Working closely with Olin, architects from Studios Architecture designed the structure to suggest that the landscape is peeling up. At the base, a concrete plate forms a bench where people can lace their skates, and then it folds sharply to become a set of stairs up to the sedum-planted roof. Above the skate rental booth a white acrylic cube hovers, both a beacon and a projection screen for movies and art.
The building's small footprint and 360-degree visibility were tough constraints, says Brian Pilot of Studios, who led the pavilion design with David Burns. “There's no back side, no alley side. The roof is an equally important elevation, with neighboring buildings looking down on it.”
Not visible are the below-grade systems that make Canal Park a working landscape. Large cisterns hold storm water that supplies the fountain, the irrigation system, the ice rink, and the toilets. Ample rain gardens on the eastern edge of the site filter runoff, and geothermal wells heat and cool the Tavern. A pilot project for the Sustainable Sites Initiative, a voluntary set of guidelines and benchmarks for landscape design, the park treats 100 percent of the storm water that hits it—and the neighboring three developments.
Between the Canal Park's November opening and the end of February, almost 20,000 people used the skating rink, well beyond expectations. In the warmer weather, the park hosts a farmers' market, movie nights, and lunchtime concerts. Since it's not located on a major thoroughfare, it “has to try a little bit harder to get noticed,” Pilot says—and, so far, it seems to be working just fine.
from archrecord