Final Pieces of Navy Monument Installed

The artist team of Al McWilliams, Joost Bakker and Bruce Haden were in Ottawa this month to install the final pieces of the Canadian Navy Monument, including the gold spheres that top the marble-faced Signature and the gold Mast finial.  The views from on top of and under the Portage Bridge are even more impressive than we anticipated, and the gold elements looks spectacular in the Ottawa winter landscape.  Congratulations to the team, including Vance Harris at Dialog, who prepared all the working drawings for the Signature.  We look forward to the long awaited opening of the monument this coming spring, when Hapa's landscape design - including the lawn berms, ring of oak trees and spring bulbs - will be a bit more visible!

Hapa Wins the Market Lane Design Competition

This is starting to go to our heads! 

Fresh on the heels of our Re:Connect Ideas Competition win in December,  we are pleased to announce that Hapa Collaborative has been named the winner of the Market Lane Design Competition in London Ontario.  As one of five shortlisted teams invited to submit designs for this urban lane in downtown London, Hapa’s Figure Ground design, which you can view at www.hapacobo.com or here at the City of London's web site was selected as the unanimous choice of the jurors, over schemes by some of Canada’s most noted landscape architecture firms including JRA, PFS, and DTAH.

According to the jury, Hapa’s proposal distinguished itself by capturing the spirit of London; responding to the need for a pedestrian focused, day and night, all season urban environment; providing opportunities for interaction with the surrounding context and festival activity and innovatively responding to the community’s aspirations for the Market Lane. In the words of one of the jurors, “Hapa’s proposed design for Market Lane is beautiful in its simplicity, functionality, economy and contextual relevance: it promises a lovely, variable, and at times celebratory experience of place, daily and seasonally.”

Hapa Collaborative wishes to thank the City of London for inviting our participation in the competition, the jury for their careful contemplation of our work, and our fellow design competitors who developed equally compelling design ideas for a very challenging site and context.

We look forward to engaging with the City of London staff to begin the next stage of work on this exciting project!

Merry Christmas and Best Wishes for 2012

With the holiday season upon us, we find ourselves at Hapa reflecting on a very eventful past year and on those who have helped to shape our business in a most significant way.  We value our relationship with all of our collaborators and look forward to working with you in the year to come.

Have a wonderful Christmas and best wishes for the year ahead!

Sarah, Hanako, Katherine and Joe

 

hapa wins re:connect ideas competition

 

Hapa Collaborative is proud to announce our second competition win in three years.  Hapa was selected as the winner of the re|connect Ideas Competition, an international design review to generate ideas for the Viaducts and Eastern Core of downtown.  Hapa's proposal was selected from over two dozen submittals from around the world, including competitors from Europe and Asia, and was chosen as the winner of the Connecting the Core category, which focused on a new future for the area east of the Canadian National Railway station up to Clark Drive.

Our proposal is called Darn, a strategy to mend the hole in the Eastern Core’s weave of streets, stitching the frayed ends of the remnant street grid to give connective strength between this area and its adjacent neighbourhoods. We propose to ‘darn’ the urban fabric in three critical locations to allow pedestrian and bike access, link over isolating features including railyards and private lands, and knot together a network that reengages the Eastern Core—an area roughly equal in size to Stanley Park—with Strathcona, Mount Pleasant, the False Creek waterfront and East Vancouver.

Hapa would like to congratulate the other winners in the competition, and thank the jury for selecting our proposal above those of many other worthy submittals.

tangential vancouverism

Hapa Collaborative is pleased to be invited to participate in the Tangential Vancouverism exhibit, curated by Ali Kenyon and Alex Buss.  With participation from four other design teams and three writers on design, Hapa will be developing concepts that will explore new directions in urban design that may represent a new type of regional vernacular architecture.  Or at least that's what we think we are doing. We'll let you know in the new year where our ideas go!

Far from being gourmands, we still have a fundamental love of eating, so thankfully Hapa's theme is food! You can check out our first image and treatise here.  Look forward to your comments.