Diana Krall Plaza offers a unique design challenge. A new proposal, an initiative headed by Dave Witty, former VP Vancouver Island University, former dean of the University of Manitoba Faculty of Architecture, was recently presented to council. There’s detail and a request for public comment and input on the project's website ReEnvision Diana Krall Plaza.
The design teams have come up with some exciting ideas, working within set guiding design principles. Witty has stressed attention to connections and linkages and engagements with the surrounding context of buildings and uses. As he’s quoted in a news story, “It’s about recognizing that Diana Krall Plaza will only work if we do something with it, one, but connect it to beyond its own site. If it’s left to be an island unto itself, it will not do what you need it to do."
The guiding design principles are especially good. All are important but some would have to be built on others. Standouts : connections and linkages; and engagement with surrounding existing and planned buildings (and of course those buildings’ all important uses). Get those right, Holly Whyte would advise, and the others can be added.
A public park is “the creature of its surroundings and of the way its surroundings generate mutual support from diverse uses, or fail to generate such support.” https://twitter.com/NanaimoCommons/status/1148650254922743809
From comments I've submitted to ReEnvision DKP : Perhaps I missed it but I didn’t see in the Charrette or the forum ideas the importance of the Port Theatre’s second stage with a lobby off the plaza. Importance of lively activation of the east side parcel is stressed—quite rightly!
Jacobs, Whyte, Gehl, Project for Public Spaces, Speck and so many others with an accumulated wealth of knowledge of the workings of a public square identify the edges as often the pubic square’s most important space. Connectivity enhancements can be made east, west, north, and south here.
Yes to pedestrianizing Wharf Street. It will need its own distinct identity and connectivity to the waterfront but can add to the success of a redesigned main plaza. A new building where the parking lot is now behind the arts building (a new enlarged public gallery perhaps or artist live/work lofts) will bring needed eyes onto the plaza. I’m remembering years ago architect Roger Kemble sketched a plaza here, an oasis. Maybe I can find a copy of his drawing. (Photo from the Downtown Urban Design Plan)
The new hotel will also bring eyes onto the plaza, making it safer and having even greater utility, and a glassed exterior elevator onto the plaza here should be considered. Personally, I always see a pedestrian overpass as a lost opportunity to create walkable urbanism at the street level. I wouldn’t want to see one across the newly upgraded and now much safer, Front St.
And a thought about the importance of an interior view of the plaza from Commercial (I’m sure everyone has seen former NYC chief planner Amanda Burden’s Ted Talk about public space, in particlular what she had to say about Paley Park) : a dramatic green-wall the entire expanse of the Port Theatre’s proscenium wall. This one’s in Madrid at the Herzog + Meuron designed CaixaForum.
