Katherine, Sarah and Joe have been documenting our design process for the Terra Nova Play Experience, including our site visits and workshops with Gilmore Elementary School kids.  Please check out the Terra Nova song - cha, cha, cha - near the end of the documentary.

You can learn more about the Play Experience coming to Terra Nova Rural Park at a public open house on Wednesday, June 6 at Thompson Community Centre, Granville Ave, Richmond BC.

With a broad range of talents that touch on all aspects of landscape architecture, Erika Mashig contributes her ability to synthesize complex construction problems and a great enthusiasm for design. Prior to joining Hapa, Erika worked with Phillips Farevaag Smallenberg in Vancouver as a project manager for five years.  While at PFS she co-designed and managed construction of the first park in Canada to integrate a neighbourhood-wide stormwater treatment facility into its design. Often working with large multi-disciplinary teams, Erika carries projects through all phases, from concept to construction and brings her experience from a diverse portfolio of local projects as well as across Canada.

Erika is a member of the Squamish Nation Advisory Design Panel, a member of the BC Society of Landscape Architects and co-founder of CommunityStudio. She is also a volunteer consultant for the South Hill BIA, developing public plaza and pocket park concepts for Fraser Street in Vancouver.  

Erika’s first day on the job at Hapa saw her boarding a plane to start work on Market Lane, our newest urban pocket park in downtown London, Ontario.  It looks like Erika will be spending much of the spring and summer in the air, helping to develop working drawings and supervising construction of the project prior to the November 2012 opening.  

Up to 60 kids developed sketches, collages, models and even performance pieces that captured their ideas for the best possible play experience.  Katherine and Sarah of Hapa and Yvonne Stich and Rich Kenny of Richmond Parks described the park setting, its natural features and some of the history of the park, and the kids took it from there.  Some of the ideas included tree houses, telescope and microscope viewing, zip lines (lots of zip lines!), rafts and bridges, underwater viewing platforms, 'frog handling zones', and an 'adult hangout area'.

Hapa will incorporate many of these ideas into our concepts through the months of March and April, and will present our process and the final design scheme in May to Richmond city council, in preparation for construction in the summer.  Stay tuned for more in the spring!

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!

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!

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

Sarah, Hanako, Katherine and Joe

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.

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.

This August, Hapa staff member Katherine Wimble, working with Sarah Ferreter as The Unearth Collective, created a land art installation at the Not to Scale: Lo-Fi Arts Festival at Smoke Farm in Arlington, Washington. For By Color, the pair spent 10 hours rearranging a portion of a rocky beach on the Stillaguamish River to create a 52' x 7' rock painting.

Yesterday we learned that Google's satellite passed over and captured the art installation making the art visible from space.

http://g.co/maps/446bg

The festival was also covered by Seattle newspaper, The Stranger.