New poster here, but a long-time lurker.
There are certainly weaknesses to both proposals, but I think it’s important not to forget that both are a tremendous improvement to the status quo for Ottawa. I for one did not expect either proposal to be as awe-inspiring as they ended up being.
That being said, I do think that the Rendezvous proposal is the better one, urban design wise. There seems to be better integration of public use elements with residential components, and there is better adaptive reuse of what already exists on the property, namely the aqueduct. It also better integrates with the surrounding street-grid and sight-lines, making it stick out less like a sore thumb.
Even from their sample images themselves, you can tell that Rendezvous put a lot of thought into how the pieces fit together; you have lots of shots spanning the entire project, while with the DCDLS one focuses on each individual building.
A project is more than just the sum of its individual parts.
Proponents of the DCDLS project argue that it offers more attractions, and thus offer more tourist value. But you can’t just think that if you build it, they will come. Just look at Victory Park, Dallas, which was a similar master-planned development. Featuring a Museum of Nature and Science, the American Airlines Center, a live-music venue (House of Blues), a ‘luxury gourmet grocer’, and more, it was a failure because it failed to attract
people (
http://www.salon.com/2012/05/19/urba...o_one_has_fun/).
By splitting the residential element of the proposal from the public realm elements, the DCDLS proposal has some of the same failings. It’s also heavily weighed towards single-use attractions that do not provide much utility to the people that will live nearby. While attractions are nice, the biggest part of what makes a city attractive is the people.
I was born in Toronto, and went to university in Montreal. During my time in both cities, I’ve never felt like they could have used another aquarium, or a downtown sky-diving simulator, to be a better place to live. The thing I loved about both cities was that every time you walked outside, you would experience something different. I once jogged up Mount Royal at 4 in the morning, and saw a unicycle troupe practicing at the observatory. I’ve seen more people lined up for Tetsu’s Japanese Cheesecake in Toronto than I’ve seen walking through Sparks Street (a bit of an indictment of both cities). While Ottawa is an amazing city to live in, I’ve never felt that same degree of urban vibrance.
While some of it is certainly due to the population difference, another part of it self-inflicted. We worry too much about ‘national significance’, about ‘becoming more of a destination’, about ‘coming out of the shadow of Toronto’. In the midst of all this, we forget to consider that Ottawa also needs to be a city that people live in. While neither Lebreton Flats proposal is perfect, the Rendezvous proposal is the one that clearly has put more thought into creating a living, breathing community.
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