Let's make sure Nepean Point's new park works as a park
David Reevely David Reevely
Published on: October 6, 2017 | Last Updated: October 6, 2017 5:34 PM EDT
If renovating Nepean Point is going to be worth the money, we have to make it magnetic, a place people cannot help but visit.
The lookout behind the National Gallery is a spectacular spot with glorious views of the heart of Ottawa and Gatineau. It’s also hard to get to and there’s nothing to do when you arrive but take in the view and then leave again. A couple of sculptures are all but concealed there. The decaying amphitheatre needs major work. The NCC rightly wants to take the opportunity to spiff the space up and connect it better to the rest of Ottawa, and it has $6.7 million to spend.
So here we are with the design competition, with four teams of experts presenting on Thursday different visions for how to renovate the place: “A Park For Our Nation In Progress,” “Bluff Point,” “Nogoshkodadwin Park,” and “Big River Landscape,” they’re called. They’re all pretty similar.
A fun game would be to read the descriptions and every time you see the words “dynamic” or “iconic,” take a drink. Actually, don’t do that, because you’ll die. “Meander” will get you pretty squiffed. “Choreographed” is about right for a fun night.
One proposal is to scrape the highest part of Nepean Point down to bedrock for “a clean start and a new terrain for all Canadians to inscribe the future evolution of the park.”
With what? Ah. “A fleet of small-scale equipment and supplies (carving and cultivation tools, water, soil, seeds, stools, hammocks) is supplied at the gate,” to help create “a process-based park” that will never be truly finished. Or a mess.
The renderings show children scampering barefoot on the rough rock. One little girl is about to pitch straight into an open firepit where a guy, implicitly Indigenous, is just sitting playing a drum while a lady takes his picture.
Another team’s renderings look as if they’ve been smeared with Vaseline. The shafts of sunlight are clearer than the features they’re supposedly illuminating, such as groves full of ghostly white cutouts of people.
This is before we get into the descriptive language. One proposal makes very much of Nepean Point as a symbolic meeting place for Indigenous and European cultures, which is fair enough.
“As we envisioned the creation of this iconic park, we used two types of geometries, symbolizing the two cultures, in order to create a seamless connection between Nepean Point, Major’s Hill Park, and the urban context through the National Gallery of Canada,” it says. “This dichotomy of geometries meanders through the site, finds its way to the point, merges and meets at the centre of the park.”
Another proposal also wants to connect the past to the present and also “form a platform upon which new cultural memories can be created.”
Here’s how: “In order to connect to the past, we envision a park where a visitor’s journey through the landscape is punctuated by moments where they can listen to the ‘voices’ of others and contribute their own voice to a dynamic conversation.”
The “voices of others” include the sounds of leaves and from the “power of the churning river below” (n.b. the Ottawa River does not churn below Nepean Point). There will be a place with “deep seating nooks” where people can experience “subtle ephemeral narratives” that “emanate from within the landscape,” and a firepit with “animated dialogue.”
So in some places the voices are metaphorical, in other places literal, and in the case of the churning river, imaginary. I guess contributing your own voice means you … whisper O Canada to the leaves?
Another proposal talks about flower beds that will “provide year-round interest.” One thing flower beds cannot do in Ottawa is provide year-round interest.
These are not uniquely bad proposals or anything. They’re from national-calibre teams who obviously invested a lot of time and work. This is what practically any design-competition submission sounds like.
None of the proposals mentions children, families or play. There’s no whimsy. They’re all about making the landscape into a cultural and intellectual experience, which is the NCC’s doing: its vision for Nepean Point is to “offer a multi-sensory experience, allowing visitors to discover the Canadian soul, as well as Canadian symbols, values, poetry and way of life.” It says nothing about fun.
You ask for guff, you get guff.
What’s worryingly missing is what exactly will draw people to Nepean Point when we aren’t going in numbers now. The renderings are crowded with visitors in all seasons, but … why?
All four proposals talk about eventually improving Nepean Point’s connection to Major’s Hill Park — three with walkable overpasses of the approach to the Alexandra Bridge, one with an underpass. Making it easier to reach will help.
Two of the four proposals mention cafés. The popularity of the nearby Tavern on the Hill this summer suggests that’s a good idea. But what else have you got?
Think of what a non-draw the Garden of the Provinces is, or Commissioners Park when there’s no festival in it. They’re nice enough, well kept and in pretty locations, but there’s no real reason to visit them. People at least pass through them on their way elsewhere.
Maybe there’s deep latent demand for subtle ephemeral narratives and meandering geometric dichotomies? I fret there isn’t.
This is how the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto ended up with its $135-million “crystal” addition to its stately old castle. Designed by star architect Daniel Libeskind, it’s a tremendous architectural statement, inspired by the museum’s collection of gems and minerals, that opened in 2007.
“Libeskind created a structure of organically interlocking prismatic forms turning this important corner of Toronto, and the entire museum complex, into a luminous beacon,” Libeskind’s studio says of it. The museum people adored it before it was built.
Problematically, it’s kind of a bad space for displaying artifacts (like the outside, the interior walls are all at odd angles, not straight up and down) and it contains an inadequate ground-level entrance to the museum that the provincial government is paying to replace. It leaked and in a Canadian winter was a perfect machine for making icicles and pelting them down on passersby.
They forgot to ask whether the crystal addition to the museum would work as a museum. We’re in danger of spending millions of dollars on a Nepean Point park without asking whether it works as a park.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
http://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-...orks-as-a-park
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